Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring/Summer 2015

nsin U

l ia ec issue sp LE B

O

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

A Year at Allen Farm John Gremmer captures the changing face of Wisconsin farm life

The Resurrection of the Lord God Bird B.J. Hollars goes in search of the once-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker

The Art of David McLimans $5.00 Vol. 61, No. 2 & 3

Spring/Summer 2015

A Watrous Gallery retrospective explores the work of a beloved illustrator

!

people & ideas

D

wisc

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

Contents

spring/summer 2015 FEATURES 4 FROM THE Director Securing the Keystones

6 EDITOR’s NOTES Building a Better Magazine

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

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

7 Upfront 7 Wisconsin artists receive national awards for work at the intersections 8 Mile of Music festival brings music and education to the Fox Valley 11 Saying goodbye to Appleton poet Ellen Kort 12 New Madison Science Museum opens this fall 14 FEllows Forum Conservation biologist and Academy Fellow Stanley A. Temple recalls how Rachel Carson instilled in him a childhood sense of wonder.

20 initiatives Report Wisconsin Academy Initiatives program director Meredith Keller shares some new Waters of Wisconsin and Climate &. Energy tools we can all use.

24 PHOTO ESSAY Photographer John Gremmer’s chronicle of a year in the life of Allen Farm in Allenville.

32 science & human health How are microbes beneficial to human health? Science writer Jacqueline Houtman takes us inside the human microbiome.

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

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

Photo credit: Copyright © 2014 by John Gremmer

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

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Annaleigh Wetzel, editorial assistant Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Chou harvesting the corn at dawn, 2014. Photograph by John Gremmer

Above: Winneconnie-based photographer John Gremmer spent a year capturing the working life of Allen Farm. See his photo essay on page 24.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

1

Contents

spring/summer 2015 FEATURES 40 ESSAY

Author B.J. Hollars embarks on a quest to find the once-extinct

ivory-billed woodpecker—better known as the Lord God Bird.

46 AT the Watrous Gallery

An essay by author and Wisconsin Academy Fellow Lorrie Moore

provides insight into the life and works of artist David McLimans.

58 Read Wisconsin

Meet the winners of our 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction and

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

Poetry Contests.

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder • Executive Director Rachel Bruya • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Zachary Carlson • Web Editor Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai • Project Coordinator Meredith Keller • Initiatives Director Elysse Lindell • Outreach & Data Coordinator Don Meyer • Business Operations Manager Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Communications Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

59 FIctiON

“Geography Lesson,” by Nikki Kallio, the first-place prizewinning short

story from our 2015 Fiction Contest.

61 Book Reviews 61 Zachary Carlson reviews Beneath the Bonfire: Stories,

by Nickolas Butler

63 Claire Dulgar reviews Tracks on Damp Sand: Poems,

by Franco Pagnucci

65 New & Recent Books

A list of new and recent books published by Wisconsin authors

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

66 Poetry

Poems from our 2015 Poetry Contest winners: Lisa Vihos, Sean Avery, and Kathleen Dale.

Above: Artist David McLimans (1948–2014) poses with a collection of his sculptures—just a portion of a body of work that spans multiple media. See more on page 46.

2

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo credit: Joseph Blough. Copyright © 2010 by JB Patrick Flynn.

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

Contents

NEWS for

MEMBERS NOMINATE A FELLOW We are currently accepting online nominations for our Spring 2016 class of Wisconsin Academy Fellows. If you know someone who has made extraordinary contributions to the sciences, arts, and/or the cultural life of the state, please consider nominating them as a Fellow. To be considered, nominations must be received at wisconsinacademy.org/nominate

by September 30th, 2015. If you have questions about the Fellows nomination process, please contact Aaron Fai at 608-263-1692 x14.

2015 MEMBER MEETING This fall we are bringing together members of the Wisconsin Academy for a two-day gathering (November 6 & 7). For more information: see page 4 or visit wisconsinacademy. org/2015membermeeting for a complete program description and registration details. Early bird registration is open until October 1, 2015.

QUESTIONS ABOUT MEMBERSHIP? We’re pleased to be able to deliver Wisconsin People & Ideas directly to the homes and offices of our members. If you have question about your membership status, require a renewal, or are interested in becoming a member of the Wisconsin Academy, please contact our office at 608-2631692 or members@wisconsinacademy. org.

STAY CONNECTED In between issues of Wisconsin People & Ideas visit us at wisconsinacademy. org for information about events, happenings, and our latest blog posts.

You can also follow the Academy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

We’re also in the process of updating our website, and should have a more content-rich and easier-to-navigate site for members and the general public by January 2016.

C

o

n

t

r

i

b

u

t

o

r

s

Brenda K. Bredahl enjoys attending her son’s high school band and orchestra performances. As a member of the Hudson Marching Band Parent Group, she is helping the group raise funds for new uniforms and a travel trailer. Bredahl holds an MA from the University of Minnesota– Twin Cities and BS from UW–River Falls, where she passed Intro to Piano for Non-music Majors, learning the required songs by ear.

John Gremmer is a retired biology teacher and photographer. He grew up in Peshtigo and now lives in Winneconne with his wife, Sue. Gremmer’s love of art and photography was fostered by his mother Dorothy, who was an artist, and his father Henry, whose avocation was photography. A selection of his work can be viewed at flickr.com/photos/j_henry_g.

B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death and Being Human (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Hollars is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

JaDqueline Houtman is a freelance biomedical science writer and editor based in Madison. Her science writing for adults and children has appeared in World Book Science Year, Cleveland Clinic Magazine, The Dana Foundation’s Progress in Brain Research, The Dana Sourcebook of Immunology, and numerous academic and educational publications.

Houtman has published two books for young readers, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas (Boyds Mills Press, 2012) and Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist (with Walter Naegle and Michael G. Long, Quaker Press, 2014). She can be reached via her website: jhoutman.com.

Meredith Keller joined the Wisconsin Academy as Initiatives director in fall of 2014 after two years of leading the Minnesota Waters Program at Conservation Minnesota and working with citizens’ groups and state agencies to control the spread of aquatic invasive species. Keller attended UW–Madison for Environmental Studies, History, and Political Science, after serving in the Reading Corps Program in Minnesota and working on a U.S. Senatorial race in 2008. She lives in Madison.

Nicole Miller is the news manager for the UW–Madison College of Agricultural & Life Sciences. She received her BS in biochemistry from the University of Washington and worked as a laboratory technician for a number of years before completing her MS in the UW–Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication and joining the academic staff.

Lorrie Moore, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the UW–Madison, is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. A Wisconsin Academy Fellow, Moore has received honors for her work, among them the Irish Times International Prize for Literature and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf, 2009), was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Stanley A. Temple is the Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in Conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and former Chairman of the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development Program in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW–Madison. A Wisconsin Academy Fellow, Temple has for 32 years held the academic position once occupied by Aldo Leopold, and during that time he won every teaching award for which he was eligible.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

3

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

Securing the Keystones Jane Elder wisconsin academy Executive director This spring, the Wisconsin Academy brought together our Waters of Wisconsin Initiative leaders for a day of intense discussion about the state of Wisconsin’s freshwater ecosystems. Part of our discussion was devoted to the health of the Great Lakes.

During a break, I overheard a colleague say, “When we’re gone, we’ll be the last generation that remembers the wild fishery in the Great Lakes.”

I’m guessing those of us in earshot were mostly Baby Boomers, and I realized—at least for us—he was right.

During early settlement, new immigrants to this region were astonished by the bounty of the Great Lakes fishery. They harvested lake trout, whitefish, lake herring, perch, chubs, and more. But “peak fish” happened in the last decade of the 19th century, and the bounty has declined since. Growing up in Michigan, I remember lake trout and whitefish on the dinner table, but by the time I was eight years old, the commercial harvest of lake trout was halted because the population had crashed.

Over the years, the lake trout all but disappeared from the Great Lakes due to many factors: over-fishing, aggressive predation from lamprey, the impacts of chemicals like PCBs and dioxin on reproductive capacity, habitat changes and losses, and the parallel loss of the trout’s natural food sources.

Scientists use various indicators to gauge the health of an ecosystem—much like vital signs are used to gauge human health. Lake trout are a key indicator for the biological health of the upper Great Lakes. They are top predators and what ecologists sometimes refer to as keystone species in an ecosystem.

Like an architectural keystone, when a keystone species of an ecosystem is removed the structure falls apart. We have spent millions of dollars trying to restore the lake trout since their precipitous decline. And while in some parts of the Great Lakes they are again successfully reproducing, when the habitat and food web for which a species is evolved essentially disappears, restoration is an enormous challenge.

The near loss of a keystone species like lake trout is evidence of how much humans have fundamentally altered the world’s largest freshwater lake ecosystem. Today, the Great Lakes host an odd amalgamation of Pacific salmon, Atlantic alewives, and 179 other non-native species, along with what’s left of the native fishery.

Against these odds, I still have hope that we can restore the lake trout, because without them the lakes aren’t just different, they are forever diminished.

Of course, younger generations may not remember the lake trout. Or even care that they are almost gone. Time creates new norms. I once heard the writer Sara Stein say in a lecture on ecological restoration, “We will not grieve that which we have not known.” But, it’s important for those of us who have known to convey what is at stake, what we risk losing.

4

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Recent conversations in Wisconsin about the value we place on education, our public lands, the arts, the role the sciences play in public decision-making, and so much more have me thinking about how our state is like an ecosystem: both are woven from interdependent relationships forged by individuals with unique and important roles to play. Too, in both our systems individual well-being is tied to the health and resilience of the whole.

A social community also has key indicators by which we can gauge its health and vitality. For instance, a strong educational system is one of our state’s keystones. Healthy lands and waters are others.

Over the years, we’ve made deep investments in education and access to knowledge, including the creation of world-class universities and excellent public school systems. We also chose to restore our forests after the 19th century logging boom, pioneer a new way of farming after the 1930s Dust Bowl, and find better ways to protect the lakes, streams, and waterways that we all use for recreation, commerce, and just about everything else.

It’s easy to forget that not every state made similar choices. But, oh, what we have gained from doing so.

Yet many of us—including me—took these keystones for granted, thinking they would always be here to strengthen and support this marvelous edifice we call Wisconsin.

Today, there are cracks in these keystones.

If we are to repair them, we must remember that good choices reflect not only a vision for the future, but also commitments of time, sweat, and money. Strong educational systems and healthy lands and waters don’t happen on their own—nor do they happen for free.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves and secure our keystones. Let’s remind ourselves and others of the investments we’ve made, of just what is at stake. Otherwise, tomorrow we’ll wake up in a Wisconsin that is not just different but diminished.

Over the next year, we’re focusing many Academy programs and publications on securing keystones for Wisconsin’s future.

We hope you will join us to affirm, celebrate, and perpetuate the ideals that inspired the Academy’s founders, the ideals found in the Wisconsin Idea, the social and cultural advances of the Progressive Era, and Aldo Leopold’s vision for an ethical relationship with the land.

All of these mean Wisconsin to me. How about you?

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

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

2015 Member Meeting

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

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

Photos by Megan Monday Photography

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

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

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

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

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

R. Alta Charo

Kathy Kelsey Foley

John Gurda

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

Register early online to secure your space at wisconsinacademy.org/membermeeting2015 or call 608-263-1692 x14 for more information.

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

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

Questions about registration or local accommodations?

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

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

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

EDItor’s Notes

Building a Better Magazine Jason A. Smith Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Now that I am entering my eighth year as editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what this magazine means to me—and to its readers.

One way to think of the magazine is as a bridge to understanding. And I, as editor, am at turns surveyor, architect, and bricklayer: all three of which are constantly working toward consensus as to what we are doing and how best to do it. I’ll admit that at times I also happily make the bricks and mortar for this bridge. But the real raw material comes directly from the hearts and minds of the writers and artists who commit their words and images to our pages. Without them there is no bridge, no understanding.

But it isn’t always easy for me to gauge how far this bridge is taking us. As such, it helps to get reader feedback. While letters to the editor and e-mails expressing one’s opinions are one way to tell me what we’re doing right or wrong, surveys provide a bit more detail due to their capacity to show reader consensus around certain themes or ideas.

Many readers of this magazine took the time to complete our Academy member survey this past May, which revealed that many of us would like to see more of three things: essays about contemporary Wisconsin culture, features about environmental topics, and articles by and about interesting Wisconsin people. Too, survey respondents indicated that they highly valued the original poetry and fiction we publish, which, as one of the last remaining print vehicles for original literary composition, makes me happy.

Over the past few weeks during time off spent with my new baby—Maxwell Roman Smith—I’ve been thinking about the survey results and how to build a better magazine. One of my goals as editor is that the magazine should be eminently readable and that our articles need to be interesting to anyone with a degree of intellectual curiosity. In short, articles should be able to stand alone as what one would consider “a good read.”

At the same time, I realize that people value the magazine and the articles therein because they come together under the polydisciplinary umbrella of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. So, we are working on better contextual elements in the magazine, some stars by which readers might navigate any particular article to better understand why the Wisconsin Academy is committing it to print.

You might notice new thematic headers running across the tops of pages or the “About this Program” popouts in this issue that help identify the type of article you are reading and its connection to the Academy’s larger spectrum of programming: the brief description of our Academy Fellows program on page 15, of which essay author Stanley A. Temple is a part, or information about our James Watrous Gallery on page 47 of the article about artist David McLimans.

6

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

While these popouts help remind our readers that many of our magazine articles reflect aspects of current Academy programs, just as many if not more articles in this issue at first glance don’t directly connect to our programs. That is, until you begin to think about the themes we are exploring—the changing face of Wisconsin farm life, microbes and human health, the loss of a species—and how they all reflect a desire to understand life and how to live it with meaning for yourself, and how to make it better for all. This is the whole reason the Academy exists: to explore, explain, and sustain thought and culture. We do it for the people of our great state of Wisconsin.

Any new magazine content, then, much like the recent photo essays we’ve been publishing, has to do a good job of showing us “ourselves.” Lately, I’ve been considering a section of the magazine called Wisconsin Table that includes interviews with Wisconsin chefs who use locally sourced ingredients (and who might share a recipe for a favorite dish), artisan or small-batch producers of specialty food and beverages, and creative foodrelated events or endeavors that celebrate Wisconsin’s food heritage and future.

Too, I think we’re overdue in revisiting a little utilized feature called Inside the Academy in which we provide glimpses of life inside our venerable organization. Of course, this doesn’t mean a running description of staff meeting minutes or updates from the water cooler. Rather, it is a way to show the broader Academy community at work and at play: our members, Fellows, and friends participating in a Watrous Gallery exhibition or poetry reading in Madison, an Academy Talk in Wausau, a Waters of Wisconsin Summit in La Crosse, or panel discussion on climate change in Ashland.

The people who comprise this organization are so expressive, so compassionate, and so darn smart. To be honest, we need to remind ourselves—and point out to others here in our state and around the world—that there is a Wisconsin simply bursting with these kinds of people right now.

So, while we’re working to build a better magazine, perhaps you can help us by extending to family, friends, and colleagues an invitation to share the best of who we are in Wisconsin. Share your copy of this issue with a friend, bring a colleague to an Academy Talk or Watrous Gallery exhibition, purchase a gift membership for a relative, or find another way to share what you love about the Academy. Help us build the bridge to understanding, build a better magazine, and build a better Wisconsin for all.

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

UPFRONT

Wisconsin Artists Receive National Awards for Work

at the Intersection of Science, Art, and Culture

straw artist and folk painter, Wadina garnered the nation’s highest honor for folk and traditional arts for intricate weavings that reflect her Slovakian heritage.

The weaving of wheat, rye, oat, and barley straw is an ancient art, with connections to harvest beliefs of fertility and protection.

To learn other weaves beyond what her grandmother Johanna Biksadski taught her, Wadina took apart samples from Slovakia to determine their construction. “This would stir memories from Grandma and she would tell me about the customs and traditions associated with the pieces I was recreating, ” she says.

Wadina learned other designs from books and from studying with master straw weavers around the world. “I ‘invented’ new plaits when I would make a slight mistake in the number or direction of a weave,” she says.

Pieces that she has designed and created appear in collections around the world, including the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, the Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Washington DC, and on Christmas trees in the Wisconsin State Capitol and the White House.

Through her dedication to preserving the art, Wadina has become a master weaver herself. In 1992, Wadina was recognized as a master folk artist by the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Wadina is currently a folk art instructor at the Kenosha Public Museum, where she hopes to pass on this ancient art to future generations. “My grandmother told me, ‘Sidonka, you are the future. It is up to you to pass this along or it will be lost forever.’ ” Wadina has taken her grandmother’s charge to heart, teaching others through continued participation in the Milwaukee Holiday Folk Fair (which grandmother Biksadski helped to found) for over sixty years, writing for the Wisconsin Slovak Historical Society, and presenting at venues locally and internationally.

—Jason A. Smith & Annaleigh Wetzel

Photo credit: Wisconsin Arts Board

Photo credit: Copyright © 2015 by Kay Springwater.

Wisconsin is rich with visual artists who are working at the intersections of the sciences, arts, and letters. Two artists recently took home national awards for fascinating and compelling works that explore human interaction with the earth, with each other, and with our cultural past.

In May 2015, Madison-based fiber artist Leah Evans took home the first-ever Honoring the Future Sustainability Award, presented at the opening of the prestigious 2015 Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington DC. The national award, which comes with a $1,000 prize, recognizes an artist whose work educates the public about climate change or inspires or models a sustainable response to climate change.

Readers of this magazine and attendees of the James Watrous Gallery’s Stitched Ground: Four Artists Embroider the Land (2010) exhibition will recognize Evans’ large-scale, quilted wall hangings, which often focus on the ways in which humans influence the environment. Working with a household-use Kenmore sewing machine, chalk, needles, rulers, compass, staple gun, and scissors, Evans creates what she calls “subtle reminders of how our actions can create both destruction and opportunity.”

“Leah Evans was right on the mark in a field of very strong and appropriate artist submissions. Her quilted fabric portrayals of changing river patterns and shorelines clearly called attention to the impacts of climate change,” says Lloyd Herman, founding director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery and lead judge for the award.

The Sustainability Award is the result of a partnership between Honoring the Future and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, a volunteer grant-making organization dedicated to advancing the Smithsonian’s mission to increase and diffuse knowledge.

This June, Lyons artist Sidonka Wadina was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship. A master

Above: (left) Evans was one of twenty-one artists from twelve states vying for the inaugural Honoring the Future Sustainability Award. (right) Wadina grew up in a Slovak neighborhood in Milwaukee, decorating eggs and weaving straw designs with her immigrant grandmother.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

7

UPFRONT

A Music Festival That’s Miles Ahead:

Appleton’s Mile of Music

Above (l to r): Mike Maimone of the band Mutts performs at Déjà Vu during last year’s Mile of Music festival (photo by Graham Washatka).

A young festival attendee participates in one of many music education events (photo by Larry Radloff). Musicians perform on the Mile of Music bus during the festival (photo by Graham Washatka).

After a few whirlwind years of touring, media appearances, and studio recordings, award-winning musician Cory Chisel is grateful to be back home in Appleton. Even when he is on the road, the pull to return home is strong for Chisel—especially in the summertime, when the annual Mile of Music festival, which he helped to establish in 2013, takes place in the schools, bars, concert halls, and streets of his hometown Appleton.

“It’s my favorite weekend of the year,” says Chisel.

But it took a tremendous community effort to make this weekend happen.

According to Fox Valley marketing professional and community volunteer Dave Willems, the idea for a citywide music festival had been percolating for years. But the Mile of Music festival really crystallized after a conversation Willems and Chisel had in 2012. They both realized that they shared a similar vision for a regional music festival with a distinct Wisconsin flavor that leans more toward an intimate, personal experience for the audience and artists alike.

“We got to talking about music, our shared work with nonprofits, the importance of local businesses, and Appleton’s walkable downtown, and all the pieces fit together,” says Willems. “The kicker was that Cory has a huge music presence that was launched in Appleton. He said he wouldn’t have gotten to the next level if it weren’t for the support of his following here.”

8

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

Named Rolling Stone Best New Artist in 2009, Chisel says he is grateful for the encouragement and support he’s received from the Fox Valley community.

Ever since he received a scholarship to Appleton Boy Choir, his heart and hands

Music education curator Leila Ramagopal Pertl believes that “music is a birthright,” and says that there is a misperception that music is somehow divided into two categories: the makers and the listeners. have been invested in Appleton arts and education, even partnering with the Fox River Valley Environmental and Education Alliance to develop the former Monte Alverno Retreat & Spirituality Center into a space for creativity.

Chisel, who acts as the festival’s music curator, says that the Mile of Music festival “initially started with my dream scenario of artists that I wanted to see. [Today it has] branched out into including artists I felt would be emerging onto the national scene—gathering that insider info from touring.”

Helping to organize a free, public music festival was simply another opporP E O P L E

&

I D E A S

tunity for Chisel to give back to the community. And he and Willems knew that there was a top-notch educational partner at the end of College Avenue.

“With Lawrence University … we had a great opportunity to weave music education and support for it into what we were creating,” notes Willems.

The two found willing partners in Leila Ramagopal Pertl, director of Lawrence University’s Academy of Music community program, and Brian Pertl, dean of the Conservatory of Music.

“When we first met with Dave and Cory, the idea just clicked that a large education component would set it apart and that it could help to support music education,” says Leila Ramagopal Pertl, who is now the music education curator for Mile of Music.

Pertl believes that “music is a birthright,” and says that there is a misperception that music is somehow divided into two categories: the makers and the listeners. At Mile of Music, now in its third year, Pertl hopes people will “re-enliven their inner musician, not only by seeing and hearing local and national performers, but also with participation in music-making events, and talking with and learning from the performers in discussions and workshops.”

According to Pertl, the most popular music-making workshops are often foreign to most Americans: African drums, the Australian indigenous didjeridu (a large wind instrument), the Balinese gamelan (a collection of metal

UPFRONT

Above (l to r): Music Education Team member Eli Grover gives instruction on the Balinese gamelan (photo by Larry Radloff). A packed Lawrence Memorial Chapel during the closing “Song Before We Go”concert by Cory Chisel and friends (photo by Graham Washatka).

Christopher Gold, Freddie Haas, and Cory Chisel (l to r) perform on stage at the Lawrence Memorial Chapel (photo by Brenda K. Bredahl).

xylophones with differing pitches), and many other exotic instruments.

Other popular “maker” events are Parachutes and Boomwhackers, where participants create parachutes and music and then put it all together in a performance, and the multi-day songwriting workshops. Last year’s mini song-writing event, hosted by Richie Ramone of the seminal punk band The Ramones, fired up youth and adults alike with an incredible drum workshop and stimulating panel discussion.

Dozens of mini-workshops on drum, fiddle, mandolin, harp, guitar, and other instruments bring together wouldbe and practicing musicians, while budding musicians mix with established performers at career stations, demonstrations, and panel discussions where artists are encouraged to talk freely about everything from inspiration to irritation.

Indeed, learning opportunities abound at Mile of Music, which, thanks in part to a $7,500 grant from the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to Lawrence University, has nearly quadrupled the number of education-related events since its inception.

“We’ve been able to put a small amount into the music education fund so far. And we’ve just started our downtown creative fund that will help seed projects like murals and public art,” says Willems. “Our community is willing to be patient, because this effort [to bring more creative energy to down-

town Appleton] is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Creative programming on city buses, in plazas and parks, or at coffee shops, restaurants, supper clubs, and bars will come to a crescendo this August 6–9,

Events like this do contribute to a community’s economy in an important way. But for most of the Mile of Music festival participants, it is about so much more.

“In the end it’s not about revenue or tickets sales. …

It’s about how the music brings the community together,” says Litt. when some 200 Mile of Music artists from 18 states and four countries provide 800 performances for over 35,000 attendees at more than 65 venues along the city’s mile-long College Avenue. In addition to all of these performances by local and national recording artists and musicians, the streets of Appleton come alive with music-making activities, educational workshops, and demonstrations.

While he is the music curator for Mile of Music, Chisel is also keen to incorpoW isconsin

rate the visual arts. For instance, last year, Chisel and Appleton artist John Christian Adams invited area visual artists to share their folklore interpretations for an art exhibition titled “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods.” The exhibition was inspired

by Chisel and Adams’ love of Mythical Creatures of the North Country by the late Walker D. Wyman, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls and author of 23 books on Upper Midwest folklore.

Housed in an empty warehouse a block off College Avenue, “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods” featured Appleton artist Brad Brautigam’s “uPhonium,” iPhone amplifiers fashioned from discarded horns, gramophones, and vintage telephones. Visitors were encouraged to park their iPhones and crank the tunes, with an astounding result.

This year Chisel and Adams invite artists to interpret the life and works of Harry Houdini, the famous illusionist and vaudevillian who grew up in Appleton.

Chisel and Adams have also asked that participating musicians who are visual artists as well share their work in a Mile of Music group exhibition.

A tour of Wisconsin music history will also be part of this year’s Mile of Music. Musician and animator Frank Anderson, author of the popular “Wisconsinology” blog, will share formative moments of Wisconsin music history—from the Wisconsin Chair Company’s division of Para-

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

9

mount Records that spread American blues and jazz throughout the world to Waukesha’s Les Paul, who invented the solid-body electric guitar.

Many performers and educators provide their music and expertise free of charge for the benefit of the community.

Nathan Litt, Mile of Music operations coordinator and Lawrence University alumnus, says the festival also depends heavily on volunteer and community support from local businesses, arts organizations, Lawrence University, the school district, and citizens.

“With a great many volunteers who make the festival happen, we have a model that is sustainable,” says Litt, adding that the “300 or so volunteers are good stewards and ambassadors in this festival with so many moving parts.”

The idea of presenting a multi-faceted festival such as Mile of Music is gaining

CONNECT:

momentum as other communities in the Fox Cities—and across the state— have launched similar ventures, like the new summer-long EastWest Music Fest in nearby De Pere, organized with help from Mile of Music organizers.

Events like this do contribute to a community’s economy in an important way. But for most of the Mile of Music festival participants, Litt notes that it is about so much more. “In the end it’s not about revenue or tickets sales. … It’s about how the music brings the community together,” says Litt.

Leila Ramagopal Pertl echoes that sentiment, pointing out that “what ties people to music are memories, the connections that people make, and that sense of community. These ideas are key to the philosophy of the Mile of Music.”

For more information on Mile of Music, Above: One of Brad Brautigam’s uPhonium visit mileofmusic.com. crafted from an antique radio horn speaker —Brenda K. Bredahl and a vintage telephone ringer box.

Editor’s Picks: Mile of Music 2015

Don’t miss these Wisconsin bands at this year’s festival.

All venues listed are in Appleton. Scheduling is subject to change, visit mileofmusic.com for event and venue details.

Auralai Thursday, Aug. 6, 8:50pm at Appleton Beer Factory Friday, Aug. 7, 1:05pm at Stone Cellar Saturday, Aug. 8, 9:00pm at Jim’s Place

Ida Jo Friday, Aug. 7, 1:20pm at Atlas Coffee Mill, 7:40pm at Cena Saturday, Aug. 8, 11:00am at Queen Bee, 1:00pm at Art Alley, 5:00pm at Cena

Cory Chisel & The Wandering Sons Saturday, Aug. 8, 2:50pm at the Jones Park Main Stage

Kyle Megna and the Monsoons Friday, Aug. 7, 8:20pm at Outer Edge Saturday, Aug. 8, 7:20pm at D2 Sports Pub Sunday, Aug. 9, 3:40pm at Emmett’s

Corey Mathew Hart Friday, Aug. 7, 10:20pm at Mad Hatter (solo) Saturday, Aug. 8, 12:20pm at Radisson Courtyard (full band), 6:05pm at Durty Leprechaun (solo)

The Mascot Theory Saturday, Aug. 8, 3:20pm at Chadwick’s, 9:05pm at Emmett’s Sunday, Aug. 9, 2:30pm at The Bar

GGOOLLDD Thursday, Aug. 6, 9:40pm at D2 Sports Pub Friday, Aug. 7, 7:20pm at Mill Creek

Paul Otteson/Faux Fawn Saturday, Aug. 8, 3:10pm at Fox River House, 7:30pm at Spats

Hayward Williams Friday, Aug. 7, 3:00pm at The Bar (full band), 9:35pm at CU Saloon (solo) Saturday, Aug. 8, 9:00pm Durty Leprechaun (solo)

Sarah Vos/Dead Horses Thursday, Aug. 6, 11:00pm at Appleton Beer Factory Friday, Aug. 7, 12:30pm at Houdini Plaza Thursday, Aug. 6, 2:10pm at Copper Rock (solo)

Be sure to check out this year’s music education workshops (times and locations TBD).

Brazilian Samba Drumming

Be a Backup Singer Featuring the Appleton Rock School

Milestones Artist Frank Anderson will do a series of storytelling sessions that focus on the history of Wisconsin songs and legacies of their songwriters

Blues Guitar Workshop Featuring 2015 Mile of Music artists

10

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo credit: Gina Bojarski / www.bbradcreations.com

UPFRONT

UPFRONT

A True Voice Silenced Saying Goodbye to Wisconsin Poet Ellen Kort The final verse to the living poem we all knew as Ellen Kort was completed when she passed this April at the age of 79.

Appointed by Governor Tommy Thompson as Wisconsin’s first Poet Laureate from 2000–2004, Kort was also the author of numerous books about her local and statewide community, including The Fox Heritage: A History of Wisconsin Fox Cities, The Art of Labor: Building the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, and Wisconsin Quilts: Stories in the Stitches, which was named in 2002 an Outstanding Book of Wisconsin by the Wisconsin Library Association. Kort was also author of eight books of poetry, and her work is featured in a wide variety of anthologies.

Over the years, her writing won several awards, including the Pablo Neruda Literary Prize for Poetry, the Mel Ellis/Dion Henderson Outdoor Writing Award, and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Poetry Award. Her poetry has also been performed by the New York City Dance Theater, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and is included in the Hospice Poetry Recording Project of Seattle. An ambassador for Wisconsin poetry, Kort frequently spoke on both Wisconsin and National Public Radio and traveled with her poetry throughout the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, the Bahamas, and Japan. Kort was elected a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2004.

Kort was an active volunteer, working on the Appleton Compassion Project and many other community endeavors.

For her service, she received the Thomas G. Scullen Leadership Award and the 2001 Dr. Hanns Kretzschmar “Excellence In The Arts” Award. Kort gave back to her community in a variety of ways, and, because she was passionate in her belief that poetry is for everyone, she traveled Wisconsin presenting poetry workshops for students and at-risk teens, parents grieving the death of a child, families touched by cancer and AIDS, domestic abuse survivors, and women in prison.

Kort’s influence on the Wisconsin poetry community was profound. Many Wisconsin poets credit Kort as a significant influence, mentor, and friend. Appleton poet Sarah Gilbert said, “It’s like she saw a winner in everyone she met.”

Poet Cathryn Cofell, Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission founder and the Wisconsin Academy VP of Letters, couldn’t agree more. “She had such a nurturing spirit … but an equally sharp wit and wicked sense of humor,” says Cofell.

“She raised the bar high for future laureates,” says Cofell. “We encouraged her to slow down, but she saw it as her duty to unquestionably prove how much our residents valued the position and the role poetry plays in changing a life for the better.

I don’t know where we’d be today without Ellen’s passion, commitment, and light.”

Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser notes that Kort was an “inspiration,” and she says that she frequently includes Kort’s work in her classes. One of Blaeser’s favorite passages comes from Kort’s poem “Sea Turtle”: Maybe it’s true that we all scatter trails of words and music that are embedded in our footprints. That dream-tracks cover the land, are woven through waves like a map to find our way home. And maybe there’s nothing: no tiny grain of sand, no rock, leaf or the smallest trickle of water that can’t be sung. Maybe it’s the same music the swan makes before she dies, how she finds her true voice just that once.

Wisconsin Academy staff and board thank Kort for her contributions to growth of poetry and the arts across the state, and for her pioneering work as the first Wisconsin Poet Laureate.

She will be missed by many.

Over and Over Again When I go to the grocery store and stand in front of the shelf filled with jars of honey every brand spells the word Mama early morning toast sliced from a loaf of homemade bread spread with honey dipped from the little wax rooms of bees Honey was a luxury at our house and every time we had it Mama told us how bees need strength to fly from one plant to another how their little bodies grow fat from the dust of pollen when they enter the open house of flowers how they have to regurgitate a sip of nectar 200 times in order to turn it into honey Mama naming what cannot be named the pure grace of hard labor the soft hum of gratitude Mama I’m beginning to understand how the long Years unwind how stories come back On the wings of memory simple things Locked together an offering of recurring Echoes Even now your voice sweet as honey —Ellen Kort

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

11

UPFRONT

New Madison Science Museum Opens this Fall

ratory space previously occupied by biochemistry professor Marv Johnson.

“Marv had kept all of his old instruments, protecting them so they didn’t get thrown away. So I walked into a lab that was already full of fifty-year-old instruments,” says Nelson, who hung on to everything—and soon started adding his own pieces to the collection.

“When somebody had an instrument they didn’t need anymore, I grabbed it,”

12

P E O P L E

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

Photo credit: Sevie Kenyon/UW–Madison CALS

Generally it’s a bad thing to be called a “hoarder.” In David Nelson’s case, however, his pack rat tendencies are for a good cause—and will soon come to a very good end.

Nelson, an emeritus professor of biochemistry and de facto historian for the UW–Madison College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, has been collecting old scientific instruments, books, papers, and other scientific artifacts from the university and around Wisconsin for the past 45 years. His amassed collection—which currently fills two rooms in the Biochemical Sciences Building and one in the Old Dairy Barn—will form the foundation for the new Madison Science Museum.

“The reason I’ve saved my collection all these years is exactly this,” says Nelson. “I want it to be where people can see it and touch it and maybe even use it.”

Nelson, along with UW–Madison Biotechnology Center outreach director Tom Zinnen and others, spent many years searching for a home for the science museum. Initially the goal was to site the museum on the UW–Madison campus.

But, after considering parking and public transportation options, Nelson decided that a downtown location would be best and selected the sixth floor of the Madison Area Technical College’s downtown facility. The new museum is just a stone’s throw from the Madison Children’s Museum, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, the Wisconsin Historical Museum, and Overture Center for the Arts.

“Wisconsin has a wonderful history of research, and it desperately needs to be told,” says Nelson. “The museum will pull together in one place much of the exciting science and engineering that’s been done around here in the last century.”

When Nelson joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1971, he took over the labo-

Above: (top) MATC’s downtown facility will house the new Wisconsin Science Museum. (bottom) David Nelson poses next to a Babcock centerfuge, once used to or determining the fat content of milk

&

I D E A S

he says. “And then when eBay opened up, I began to get really serious about buying [old] instruments. Usually they’re not very expensive. For instance, a Babcock centrifuge costs maybe $50 or $75, which seems like a good deal for a real piece of history.”

Over the decades, Nelson accumulated a lot of turn-of-the-century pieces, including early instruments to measure weight, quantities of light, hemoglobin in blood, and blood glucose levels for diabetics. Highlights include the ultraviolet light that Harry Steenbock used in his experiments with rickets and vitamin D; the analytical balance that Karl Paul Link used in his studies of the blood anticoagulant drug warfarin; and the light microscope that Joshua Lederberg used in his Nobel Prize-winning work on sexual recombination in bacteria.

Now these instruments—and the stories that go along with them—will be shared with the public at the Madison Science Museum. Exhibits geared toward middle- and high-school students, as well as adult learners, will highlight early scientific discoveries and connect the dots to subsequent medical and technological advances—and their commercial applications.

“There are more than 150 biotech spinoffs in the Madison area, and some of them are multi-million dollar businesses.

We want to show these accomplishments, too, and really all of the aspects of the state’s science and engineering enterprise,” says Nelson.

Exhibits will rotate, giving museum visitors a reason to come back again and again. One of the first exhibits will explore imaging technologies from microscopes to CAT scans to weather satellites.

Visit madisonsciencemuseum.org for more information about the museum grand opening and exhibition collection.

—Nicole Miller

SAVE THE DATE! October 22-25, 2015 THROUGHOUT WISCONSIN

Experiences for all ages and interests

bout Learn a kind aone-of- and ts produc s that logie techno from hail sin Wiscon

Interactive exhibits | Conversations with leading researchers Films and performances | Food tastings | Hands-on activities Scientific lectures | Products made in Wisconsin

Visit WiSciFest.org for more information.

The Wisconsin Science Festival is produced by

at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery

f e ll o w s f o r u m

Rachel Carson and a

Childhood Sense of Wonder

By Stanley A. Temple Wisconsin Academy Fellow since 2014 “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder … he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

— Rachel Carson I recently read an editorial by Harold W. Fairbanks in the 1905 edition of The Nature Study Review that contains a remarkably prescient summary of what has become a cause célèbre among today’s environmental educators.

“Children … are shut away in too many instances from a free contact with nature; their needs are so provided for and dangers guarded against, that they grow up with undeveloped capacities and in almost total ignorance of the world of nature,” lamented Fairbanks.

A proponent of the progressive “nature study movement,” an experiential approach to childhood learning about nature, Fairbanks asked readers to consider, “how much more [children] would make of their surroundings, and how much more these surroundings would heighten their interest and zest in life if they were able to appreciate them in even a very simple way.”

Recent generations of children have grown up with even fewer meaningful experiences in the outdoors than those of a century ago, and today’s youth spend far more time indoors or in highly controlled outdoor settings than ever before. In his 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, journalist and child advocate Richard Louv introduced the term “nature-deficit disorder” to characterize the long-recognized suite of problems that could be attributed to childhood isolation from nature.

Much like Fairbanks and the nature study practitioners of the late 19th and early 20th century, Louv believes that early experiences in nature profoundly influence a child’s physiological, emotional, and social development. According to Louv’s findings, children disconnected from the out of doors are very unlikely to be concerned about nature. Even worse, he notes,

they grow into adults with little or no interest in conservation or environmental stewardship.

It’s clear that if we are to cultivate knowledge about—and a sense of responsibility for—nature, we need to begin at a very young age. Those concerned about nature and environmental stewardship might benefit from considering old-fashioned, nature study as one way to offset nature-deficit disorder.

The past, as exemplified by the nature study movement, may provide key insights for environmental education today.

I can trace my fascination with nature all the way back to my pre-school years. By the time I was eight years old, that early interest prompted my decidedly non-outdoorsy mother to find ways for me to experience nature with more knowledgeable ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

WIsconsin ACADEMY FELLOWS Stanley A. Temple is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy. Since 1981, the Wisconsin Academy has honored the best and brightest of Wisconsin. The Fellows award acknowledges a high level of accomplishment as well as a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. The Fellows Forum section of the magazine provides a forum for our Fellows to share ideas and opinions about their work and lives. You can meet all of the Wisconsin Academy Fellows and learn about the Fellows program at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

Opposite page: Rachel Carson watching migrating hawks at Hawk Mountain, PA, 1945 Photo by Shirley A. Briggs. Reprinted by permission of Rachel Carson Council, Inc. W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

15

Photo by Shirley A. Briggs. Reprinted by permission of Rachel Carson Council, Inc.

f e ll o w s f o r u m

Most of the adult naturalists with whom I interacted in childhood seemed intent on teaching me facts, especially how to identify and name things. Miss Carson seemed more interested in exposing me to the pure joy of experiencing nature.

Above: Rachel Carson and friends on a bird walk in Glover Archibald Park, Washington DC. September 24, 1962.

adults. While we were living in the Washington DC area in the 1950s she let me attend field trips with the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia. I didn’t know it at the time, but the kindly woman who took me under her wing on these outings would eventually become one of my personal inspirations and professional heroes.

At first, she was simply Miss Carson to me, and she took time to interact with me in ways none of the other field trip attendees did. A connection that perhaps only birders would understand formed between us when I received as a Christmas present from my indulgent grandparents my first pair of serious birding binoculars: new, state-of-the-art Bausch and Lomb Zephyr 7x35s. Coincidently, Miss Carson also acquired the same binoculars. Although these binocs provided an icebreaker, it was clear to me, even before then, that she took special pleasure in sharing with me her sense of wonder with the natural world.

I eventually figured out that my field trip buddy was scientist and nature writer Rachel Carson, then the award-winning author of The Sea Around Us. Published in 1951, The Sea Around Us captures the mystery and allure of the ocean with a compelling blend of literary imagination and scientific expertise. I had seen the Oscar-winning nature film adaptation of the book at my local movie theater, and was flattered that such a famous person as she would take an interest in encouraging a precocious young naturalist like me.

I learned many things on those Audubon Society field trips to places like the Maryland shores and Pennsylvania’s Hawk Mountain. Most of the adult naturalists with whom I interacted in childhood seemed intent on teaching me facts, especially how to identify and name things. Miss Carson seemed more interested in exposing me to the pure joy of experiencing nature.

Carson’s sensitive and effective approach stimulated my youthful curiosity and helped me to both love and understand nature. She encouraged me to observe, to listen, to explore 16

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

and experience, to appreciate, and, most of all, to enjoy the wonders of the natural world.

Years later I would discover that her interest in helping young people enjoy nature was a lifelong passion, and that she had attempted to create a how-to guide of sorts with a 1956 article titled, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” which was eventually made into a book called The Sense of Wonder shortly after her death in 1964.

“I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel,” she wrote in The Sense of Wonder, stressing the importance of paving the way for the child to want to know rather than “put[ting] him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.”

Carson also understood how crucial it is to expose a child to nature in just the right way at just the right time, while a child’s world is “fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.” In The Sense of Wonder she describes how many of these instincts for “what is beautiful and awe-inspiring,” can be dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood: If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

For me, Carson was one adult who filled the role of “gift fairy.” And, although others would follow and influence me in different ways, her wonderful gift to me came at the perfect

Photo credit: All rights reserved © 1962 Alfred Eisenstaedt (Time & Life Pictures)

f e ll o w s f o r u m

My high school years at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History provided unparalleled opportunities that allowed the passion for nature that Rachel Carson had cultivated to mature and become eventually more focused on conservation science.

Above: In its October 1962 issue, Life magazine included this photo of Carson talking with children in the woods by her home.

time when nature was still fresh and full of wonder and excitement.

After my family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, my youthful interest in nature continued to flourish. I spent every moment I could outdoors (including, much to my mother’s dismay, frequent truancy when nature beckoned more than the classroom). My teenage enthusiasm for natural history caught the eye of several local naturalists who continued to mentor me, picking up where Rachel Carson had left off.

One naturalist who took a special interest in me was Bill Scheele, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Scheele gave me a challenging job at the museum with the clear expectation that enriching experiences there would surely lead me toward a career in the natural sciences. He was right. My high school years at the museum provided unparalleled opportunities that allowed the passion for nature that Rachel Carson had cultivated to mature and become eventually more focused on conservation science.

As the years went on and I embarked on my career as a scientist and educator, I began to wonder how Rachel Carson had formed her ideas about the importance of early exposure to nature. One can argue—and Carson herself suggests—that these ideas arose largely from her personal experiences rather than rigorous study of child development or comparisons of different methods of exposing children to nature.

While children of her generation certainly had more opportunities to spend free time in nature, an influential force at the time was the popular nature study movement championed by Cornell University illustrator and educator Anna Botsford Comstock.

In fact, Comstock literally wrote the book on the subject, and her Handbook of Nature Study, published in 1911, lasted for twenty-five editions in eight languages and touched tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of young lives across the world.

Nature study proponents like Comstock, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and Louis Agassiz believed early positive experiences in nature would lead to affection for nature, impart a basic

understanding of how the world works, and encourage a sense of environmental stewardship. From 1896 to 1904 Cornell University issued a series of “Nature-Study Leaflets” that were widely distributed to schoolteachers and students to guide their outdoor learning activities. The movement and those leaflets influenced many naturalists and scientists who grew up during this period, including Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold.

In fact, the American Nature Study Society, founded in 1908 by Comstock and Bailey, is one of America’s oldest environmental organizations still in operation today.

Rachel Carson’s mother, Maria, a former schoolteacher with an interest in natural history, would have been familiar with Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study. She introduced her young daughter to nature using methods promoted by the movement. One such exercise that Rachel Carson experienced as a child and that she shared with me was collecting caterpillars and cocoons of moths and butterflies and carefully observing them metamorphose. To this day, I can recall my childhood awe at first watching a beautiful cecropia moth emerge from a cocoon I had collected on a field trip the previous fall. Clearly, Rachel Carson would later incorporate nature study approaches such as this into her own ideas about children’s education and, in many ways, make them central tenets of her work.

Since the days of my early childhood encounters with Rachel Carson, and especially after the first Earth Day in 1970, formalized environmental education programs have emerged to expose young people to nature in structured outdoor settings, often at nature centers. This approach has been one of our society’s main remedies for “nature-deficit disorder.”

One wonders what Rachel Carson, were she alive today, would think about the approaches we have been pursuing.

After the publication of her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson was often in the news, and she was a frequent topic of lively discussions in which I took part at the Cleveland Museum. For many Americans, Silent Spring was an eye-opening W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

17

f e ll o w s f o r u m

Photo credit: Stanley A. Temple

sity. Carson died later that spring at account of the detrimental effects her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the environment—particularly the manuscript for her book on chilon birds—of the indiscriminate use dren and nature left unfinished. of pesticides. But the book was also But her inspiration lives on in many an indictment of an unregulated scientists, environmental advocates, chemical industry and the public offiand nature educators of my generacials who unquestioningly accepted tion. As Carson so aptly described in industry claims of safety.

The Sense of Wonder, that final piece I read Silent Spring and followed the of her literary legacy, human emotions public debate over DDT with special and senses are the “fertile soil” that interest, since I knew Carson and nurtures a love of nature: by that time had become especially interested in birds of prey, a group of species that was being decimated by If facts are the seeds that later produce pesticides. knowledge and wisdom, then the Then, in early 1964, I received an emotions and the impressions of the unexpected opportunity to reconnect senses are the fertile soil in which the with the woman who had nurtured seeds must grow. The years of early my early interest in nature. A family childhood are the time to prepare the friend asked if I would like to see soil. Once the emotions have been Carson, who was secretly in the aroused—a sense of the beautiful, city for medical treatment at his Above: Temple and his red-tailed hawk giving a the excitement of the new and the oncology clinic. Of course, I did, presentation on raptors and DDT in 1962. unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, and he arranged for a brief visit. admiration or love—then we wish for Although she was obviously very ill (I later learned she was knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once dying of cancer), she was as wonderful as I remembered her. found, it has lasting meaning.

She seemed pleased that my early childhood fascination with nature—which she had cultivated—had blossomed and that I For me, Rachel Carson personally prepared the soil from was going to study ecology and ornithology at Cornell Univerwhich my career and lifelong love of nature would spring. Z

Since 1981, the Wisconsin Academy has honored people who represent the best and brightest of Wisconsin. The highest level of recognition conferred by the Wisconsin Academy, the Fellows award acknowledges a high level of accomplishment as well as a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service.

Prospective Fellows are considered for their extraordinary contributions to the sciences, the arts, and the cultural life of the state. Fellows have a career marked by an unusually high order of discovery; technological accomplishment; creative productivity in literature, poetry, or the visual or performing arts; depth of public service; or other academic or cultural achievement.

Anyone can nominate a prospective Fellow for consideration. A Wisconsin Academy committee broadly representative of the sciences, arts, and letters reviews nominations and selects new Fellows every other year. For more information or to nominate a prospective Fellow, visit wisconsinacademy.org/nominate.

18

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo by Megan Monday Photography

CONNECT: Nominate a Fellow

ABOVE: The 2014 Wisconsin Academy Fellows (left to right): limnologist John J. Magnuson, museum director Kathy Kelsey Foley, conservation biologist Stanley A. Temple, materials engineer Pradeep Rohatgi, poet Robin Chapman, folklorist James P. Leary, and producer and director David Frank. For more information on the 2014 Fellows or other Fellows, visit wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

C O NV E N T ION A L

D I gI TAL

L Ar gE F Or mAT

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

F uL F I L L mE N T

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

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

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

8 6 6 ❙ 84 5 ❙ 6 5 0 5

608 ❙ 845 ❙ 6505

6 0 8 ❙ 8 4 5 ❙ 80 1 1

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

initiatives report

Above: The dramatic sandstone cliffs of Houghton Point extend into the clear waters of Lake Superior, affording views of the Apostle Islands. The Academy’s Initiatives Program works to protect and preserve state treasures like this for future generations.

Finding Your

A-HA

Moment

by M e r e di t h K e l l e r

B

efore I joined the Wisconsin Academy staff last fall, I believed it was rare to witness an individual experiencing an epiphany—a profound moment of insight, or the connection of dots that leads to a new way of looking at a problem.

I have been fortunate to see several such moments in my first nine months as the director of the Academy’s Initiatives, where I coordinate our two environmental programs: Waters of Wisconsin and Climate & Energy. I attribute the regularity of these “a-ha moments” to two key words found in the Academy’s mission statement: The Wisconsin Academy brings people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters

20

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on important issues.

The Initiatives program is the expression of the Wisconsin Idea at the Academy, a reflection of a 145-year commitment to—in the words of our charter—“gathering, sharing, and acting upon knowledge in sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin.” With this aim in mind, the Initiatives

initiatives report

program (formerly called The Wisconsin Idea at the Wisconsin Academy) brings together experts from seemingly disparate backgrounds to explore issues facing Wisconsin’s people, land, and water. These meetings between experts from myriad fields help us to connect dots—and in some cases find previously hidden dots—and move closer to solutions for the most pressing environmental issues affecting Wisconsin today.

This past December at the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council’s annual conference in Milwaukee, I saw a global industry leader actually describe his own a-ha moment. Academy executive director Jane Elder and I were invited by the Council’s executive director Tom Eggert to organize a session on the impacts of climate change on Wisconsin businesses. One of our session panelists, Thomas Myers from Jack Links (a Minong-based firm specializing in beef jerky) stood up and recounted a recent conversation he’d had with Eggert that helped him to connect a series of business-level challenges to the much larger problem of climate change.

“It wasn’t a light bulb,” said Myers, “it was like a hammer on an anvil when we were having a conversation … about why [it] was important for me to be able to speak about this today—especially for a company that doesn’t take a position on climate change.” Myers went on to say,

A-ha moments also occur when we introduce new skills to our network of experts. Our Waters of Wisconsin Leadership Network, a group of sixty experts across disciplines and geography, convenes twice each year to discuss the state of water policy and science in Wisconsin, as well as to advise on the future of the Waters of Wisconsin Initiative. This group is the first stop in for anyone across leadership communities in Wisconsin with an interest in collaborating on water strategies.

Such was the case at the 2014 Waters of Wisconsin Fall Summit, where we focused on the power of storytelling to enact change in a workshop led by Julie Swanson from Wisconsin Clearinghouse. Swanson’s energy and storytelling skills captivated our limnologists, policy-makers, social scientists, faith leaders, and other experts, setting off a roomful of a-ha moments. Her message about the power of storytelling reminded everyone in the room that, just as Wisconsin’s air, land, and water are relevant to all disciplines, so is narrative and communication. Political movements, conservation initiatives, and even effective testimonies at public hearings all rely on narrative—the way the “big story” is told. Narrative humanizes and simplifies complex subjects and ideas, rendering them intelligible and accessible; it is one of the key strategies we incorporate into our Waters of Wisconsin Initiative as we search for new ideas and more effective ways to communicate the challenges to protecting and preserving our state’s most valuable resource.

The power to bring

together experts and

leaders to synthesize and share new ideas is what

has made our Initiatives

program so essential to the people of Wisconsin since its inception in 2000

From 2012 to 2013, our meat costs went up 18%. In the following year, we again saw another substantial increase of 22% in meat costs.

Does anyone know why?

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

Drought. Climate change.

Thank you Tom [Eggert]. This is going to be great dialogue back home and to have this conversation with people who think

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

Our two current Initiatives focus on:

about it a little bit differently—but it is absolutely affecting our industry. And the drought in the Southwest, and actually across America, which drove up the grain prices … drove a lot of the cattle producers to disperse the herds. … The herd reduction has [driven] the supply down. The demand is high, and for a company that consumes [a lot] of the lean beef in the United States—which is us—[this has a] significant impact.

So this has really opened my eyes in the last 48 hours, Tom, to thinking about how I can get a better message to our organization, to taking a bigger stand on certain projects that have a bigger impact.

Myers’ a-ha moment was proof positive that bringing together experts across disciplines to discuss the intersections between, say, business, agriculture, water, and even beef jerky, can help everyone involved consider a more holistic approach to making decisions that benefit people, planet, and profit.

Waters of Wisconsin: Safeguarding Wisconsin’s fresh water ecosystems and water supply.

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

Initiatives are the Wisconsin Academy’s expression of the Wisconsin Idea, and a reflection of a 145-year commitment to “gathering, sharing, and acting upon knowledge in sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin.” Learn more about how this work serves our people, lands, and waters at wisconsinacademy.org/initiatives.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

21

initiatives report

The power to bring together experts and leaders to synthesize and share new ideas is what has made our Initiatives program so essential to the people of Wisconsin since its inception in 2000 as the Wisconsin Idea at the Wisconsin Academy. Our very first “Initiative”—the first iteration of Waters of Wisconsin— established a foundation for subsequent multi-year investigations of major challenges affecting the state.

Waters of Wisconsin established a model for civil collaboration by regularly gathering experts in policy, practice, science, and philosophy to examine and analyze the current state and long-term sustainability of Wisconsin’s waters through a process of informed discussion. The culminating Waters of Wisconsin report of 2003 was the product of years of deliberation, research, and analysis from Wisconsin Academy staff, board, and steering committee members. The report’s insights and recommendations remain relevant today, and many of its original authors volunteer as members of our current Leadership Network.

CONNECT:

Similarly, the Climate & Energy Initiative has focused on practical strategies for cutting fossil fuel emissions that cause climate change. Our 2014 report, Climate Forward: A New Roadmap for Wisconsin’s Climate & Energy Future, provides impressive yet largely unsung examples of Wisconsin business and municipalities that have committed themselves to conservation and sustainability.

One of the most practical outcomes of the dot-connecting and multi-disciplinary discovery we do through the Initiatives has been to increase public access to innovative research through our program publications—especially our Climate Forward report (2014) and Communicating About Water toolkit (2015)—and website.

You, too, are invited to explore the rich list of resources Initiative staff have generated since 2000 and apply the findings to your own business or community. All of these resources are available to the public for free on our website.

Just this year, we created an online portal for our Climate Forward report to help people learn about the Wisconsin cities and businesses setting an example

in curbing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting healthy, sustainable communities. We encourage anyone interested in exploring the connections between our energy choices and climate change to explore the Climate Forward web portal and join our conversation by attending our events or connecting with our Waters of Wisconsin and Climate & Energy blogs.

You can also help us “shift the cultural narrative on water in Wisconsin” by browsing our Communicating About Water: A Wisconsin Toolkit. If you like what you read, see if you can incorporate some of the communication tips into your own conversations about water, or share the report with local lake associations, watershed groups, and others in your community who want to have a fruitful conversation about water.

Today more than ever, the a-ha moments abound in the Wisconsin Academy Initiatives. Won’t you join us and find your own? Z

Initiatives Tools You Can Use

Today more than ever we need constructive conversation about the future of our freshwater resources and changing climate.

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

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

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

22

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

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

initiatives report

RY’S

IBRA

ISON

MAD

IC L PUBL

OCTOBER 22-25, 2015 and year round In partnership with the MADISON PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION | Events at over 20 different locations and libraries

VISIT WISCONSINBOOKFESTIVAL.ORG

Thanks to our sponsors Cheryl Rosen Weston

arts& minds ISTHMUS OF MADISON

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

ALL YOURS, ALWAYS FREE

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

Isthmus.com u facebook IsthmusMadison u twitter @isthmus

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

23

Photo essay

A Year at

Allen Farm P h o t og r ap h s by J o h n G r e mm e r

A

llen Farm is just down the road from my home near Winneconne, Wisconsin. I have passed the farm thousands of times on the way to Appleton or Oshkosh, occasionally stopping by the roadside farm stand to pick up strawberries and sweet corn in the summer, or acorn

squash in the fall.

I knew a bit about the farm’s history. In the 1940s it was owned by the Ecksteins, who were hog farmers. When their hog barn burned down in 1960, they went bankrupt. A number of different families owned the farm in brief succession. The Baer family set up a dairy operation on the land, which ran successfully through the 1980s.

As I got to know Russ and Chris Allen, the husband-and-wife team currently operating Allen Farm, I learned that in the late 1980s Russ started growing vegetables on fifteen acres he rented from the Baers. Eventually Russ and Chris Allen bought the whole farm. The Baer brothers—both of whom lived into their nineties—stayed in the house on the farm until they died.

A farm passing from generation to generation, and from family to family, isn’t a very novel concept in Wisconsin. But when I looked around the farm and saw the mix of people working here, I got to thinking about the future of this particular farm. I began to form an idea of doing a year-long photo project to capture the land and lives behind Allen Farm.

With the permission of Russ and Chris, I began taking photographs of the farm in February of 2013 and ended my shooting that November. During the intervening months I would stop by the farm several times a week and record what was going on. Russ and Chris gave me full access to the operation, and kept me informed about interesting activities that might make for good images.

The farm, 145 acres owned plus another 65 rented, is spread out on both sides of Winnebago County Highway G. The land

is home to four large greenhouses, a large and small barn, a produce stand, 18 trucks, three tractors, and the dilapidated house last occupied by the Baer brothers.

This land is also home to Russ, Chris, and, depending on the time of year, a number of seasonal workers. Mainly Hmong and Latino, the seasonal workers are not migrant workers. They live in the metro areas of Appleton and Oshkosh, driving out to the farm in the early morning hours to begin a shift that may end when the sun goes down. In many ways, these workers represent the changing face of contemporary farm life in Wisconsin.

Allen Farm grows everything from apples to zucchini, but strawberries and sweet corn are the main crops. Most of the sales are done through their produce stand off of County Highway G and others they have set up for the summer and fall in Appleton and Oshkosh. The Allens are also regulars at the Neenah, Appleton, and Oshkosh farmers’ markets as well.

It’s no secret that farmers work hard. But these people work really hard. And they all have pride in what they do.

I’m grateful to the Allens and the workers of Allen Farm for letting me record this year in their farm life—and for allowing me to share these photographs. I made around 5,000 images at the farm during my time there, 1,200 of which I saved. A hundred or so photographs went into a book about Allen Farm that I recently published called, A Year at Allen Farm. A few of them are included here.

—John Gremmer

Left: Cindy and Juana reflect the changing face of family farming in Wisconsin. They wash beets in preparation for merket.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

25

Photo essay

Springtime at the Allen Farm means it’s time for the workers to plant strawberries (top) and for Russ Allen to check the depth of the corn (bottom right) he’s just planted. Wood is chopped for the greenhouse furnace to keep the seedlings warm when the sun isn’t enough.

26

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo essay

As spring turns to summer, tomato cages are arrayed in neat rows (top) and the first crops of the season like peas (bottom left) and strawberries arrive. Early fruits and vegetables are trucked to local farmers’ markets and produce stands.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

27

Photo essay

While everyone is resting, Francisco continues to work on the tractor’s clutch (top)—not only is he a great tractor driver and all around worker, but he also has good mechanical skills. The makeshift living room (bottom) inside the big barn, where the workers rest.

28

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo essay

Summer is in full swing, with workers and the Allens in the fields by 6:00 am to prepare produce for the five farm stands. Gia and Chou (top left) and Alfred and Carlos (bottom right) fight 90-degree temperatures and mosquito swarms.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

29

Photo essay

Owners Chris and Russ Allen take a break as the season begins to wind down (top left). Lunch for Allen Farm’s Hmong workers often means prepared meals from home (bottom), while Carlos (left) snacks on a convenience store pizza.

30

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Photo essay

Dawn brings a pale light through the glass brick window of the barn (top), while a blazing orange sun (bottom) signals the conclusion of another day at Allen Farm.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

31

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

The

Human Microbiome:

by J ac q u e l i n e Ho u t ma n

your own personal ecosystem

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

W

e are not alone.

For each of the ten trillion human cells in our bodies, there are ten microbial cells living in and on us. While

our own cells carry just over 20,000 genes, when you add the microbial population—mostly bacteria—the number of genes in a human body is almost a billion.

For more than three hundred years, scientists have observed, identified, and implicated individual species of microorganisms in specific diseases. More recently, thanks to a convergence of scientific disciplines, an explosion in technology, and revolutionary new ways of thinking, we are exploring the organisms with which we share our bodies. These organisms—collectively called our microbiome—and their effect on human health are only just being recognized today.

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

Animalcules, Germs, and Disease The first person to observe microorganisms associated with the human body was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th-century Dutch merchant. Although he did not invent the microscope, van Leeuwenhoek was the first to construct devices with enough magnification and clarity to see life forms as tiny as bacteria. He described and drew pictures of what he saw, including organisms from the cleft in between his teeth and gum, where he observed “many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.”

Leeuwenhoek reported in great depth on his findings with a sense of wonder and curiosity. He made no connection between microbes and disease, since at the time infectious diseases were

When microbiologists turned their attention from a diseased human body to a healthy one, they realized there was a zoo of organisms on just about every surface. The skin, depending on the site, has between 100 and 10,000 organisms per square centimeter. But the richest populations of microbes occur in the gastrointestinal tract. thought to be caused by poisonous vapors, the influence of heavenly bodies, and bad smells.

Two centuries later, French chemist Louis Pasteur studied the organisms that ferment wine and beer. He determined that the “wrong” organisms could spoil the beverage. This led Pasteur to the idea that specific microbes could cause diseases in humans.

The germ theory of disease was further expanded by Robert Koch, a German doctor responsible for several technical and conceptual innovations that would make the modern science of microbiology possible.

During the mid-19th century, microbiologists grew bacteria in liquids such as meat broths. But if the broth contained more than one kind of organism, it was impossible to separate them. Koch, however, developed a way to isolate bacteria in order to obtain pure cultures. At first, he inoculated potato slices with a bacterial source: each of the small raised bumps that grew on the potato surface was a colony of bacteria derived from a single organism.

Koch began looking for a more suitable solid on which to grow bacteria for study. Initially, the best solution seemed to be gelatin, an animal protein. However, many bacteria consume gelatin, and those that cause disease in humans grow best at body temperature—the point at which gelatin melts.

A scientist in Koch’s lab named Walther Hesse told his wife, Angelina, about the gelatin problem. Angelina knew that her fruit jellies stayed solid throughout the summer because she used 34

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

agar-agar, a seaweed-derived polysaccharide. First used in 17th century Japan as solidifying agent, agar-agar (or agar) stays solid at temperatures used to grow cultures and isn’t digested by most bacteria. By enhancing the agar with nutrients or even blood, scientists could easily create a stable and nourishing substrate for bacteria.

The discovery of agar led to the Petri dish, a staple of the modern lab. Invented by Koch and Hesse’s colleague Julius Petri, the shallow, covered dish makes it easy to isolate and grow pure cultures of bacteria from a single cell. By diluting a liquid culture and inoculating the agar surface in a Petri dish, bacteriologists found they could count the colonies and calculate how many bacteria were in the original culture.

Koch’s groundbreaking research led him to formulate some basic rules—known as Koch’s postulates—for determining the source of infection, enabling scientists to determine if the organism in question was the perpetrator of a disease or just an innocent bystander.

In 1876, Koch was the first to associate a particular disease, anthrax, with a specific organism, Bacillus anthracis. He also discovered the microbial causes of tuberculosis and cholera. In the next thirty years, the bacteria that cause more than a dozen diseases, from gonorrhea to dysentery to whooping cough, were identified through the application of Koch’s postulates.

Based on this growing body of knowledge, more and more treatments were being developed in the pursuit of better human health, and Koch’s postulates became the gold standard for determining the cause of infectious disease for almost a hundred years.

The Microbial Menagerie When microbiologists turned their attention from a diseased human body to a healthy one, they realized there was a zoo of organisms on just about every surface, inside and out—in the nostrils and lungs, the vagina, and even on the surface of the eye. The skin, depending on the site, has between 100 and 10,000 organisms per square centimeter. The richest populations of microbes occur in the gastrointestinal tract, from the mouth to the anus. Saliva contains ten million organisms per milliliter.

The colon contains the largest population of organisms, and about a third of the mass of feces is microbes (100 billion microbes per gram). This diverse menagerie consists mostly of bacteria, but it also includes fungi (especially yeasts), protozoans, viruses, and organisms from the kingdom we now call archaea. Archaea look like bacteria, but genetic analyses have determined that they are as different from bacteria as we are from trees. Many of the organisms in the gut, mouth, and vagina are anaerobes, requiring no oxygen for essential functions.

The residents of this menagerie—often called normal microbiota, commensals or, more recently, the microbiome—are not perennial. Populations differ vastly between individuals and change frequently over the course of an individual’s life.

For instance, as newborns leave the essentially sterile environment of the womb they are quickly colonized. Organisms associated with babies delivered vaginally look like those of the mother’s vagina, but babies born by cesarean section are origi-

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

nally colonized by organisms from the mother’s and the delivery nurses’ skin. The nature of gut microbes also differ between breast-fed and formula-fed babies. A child continues to acquire new microbiota and by three years of age possesses an adult-like assortment of organisms.

Even in adults, normal microbiota can vary with diet, disease, medications, puberty, climate, occupation, and other factors.

Scientists have suspected that microbes in and on our bodies may have an impact on health and disease, and they are developing new techniques to figure out just how the microbiome works—and what happens when it doesn’t.

A Blank Canvas Just as an agar plate must be sterile in order to isolate and study the organisms used to inoculate it, studying the effects of microbes on the lives of those they inhabit is best done in an animal with no indigenous microbes.

Pasteur thought that the study of microbes in animals might benefit from the use of “pure” animals. A hen’s egg, he had suggested, could be hatched and raised in a sterile environment.

Creating pure laboratory mammals such as mice, rats, and guinea pigs required a more complicated procedure, finally perfected in the 1950s. These animals are delivered surgically to avoid contact with the mother’s microbiome and are then raised in a sterile environment with sterile food and water. Once a colony of germ-free animals is established and maintained, they can naturally produce germ-free offspring, since they carry no microbes to contaminate the newborns.

This germ-free animal is a sort of blank canvas to which specific, known organisms or populations of organisms can be introduced to produce what is known as a gnotobiotic animal (from the Greek roots meaning known and life).

Research with germ-free and gnotobiotic animal models has revealed the many beneficial functions of our microbiome.

Animals raised in the absence of any sort of microbe are certainly viable, but they develop quite abnormally. The heart, lungs, and livers are smaller than those of conventionally raised animals.

The most noticeable changes occur in the digestive tract. The part of the intestine called the cecum is dramatically enlarged, and the structure of the intestinal lining is altered, especially in places where microbes would normally be found in large numbers. Animals grown without microorganisms require about 30% more calories than conventionally grown animals to maintain their weight.

Studies using germ-free animals have helped us understand the importance of microbes in human nutrition. Nutrients that our own cells cannot utilize are readily gobbled up by our gut microbes. Most complex carbohydrates and plant polysaccharides, for example, cannot be broken down by human enzymes.

Gut microbes ferment these large molecules into smaller molecules that can be absorbed and used for energy by human cells.

In the process, they may produce gas; gut microbes are the main culprit in flatulence. Gut microbes also produce nutrients that we couldn’t get otherwise, such as vitamin B12 and vitamin K, an important blood-clotting factor.

a note about science writing for a general audience In the last decade, more than 10,000 scientific papers have been published about the human microbiome. Somewhere in those 10,000 papers, I have to find a story.

As a science writer, I start with research. I read scientific articles, interviews, and biographies. I stream videos, podcasts, and webcasts. I talk to experts. I find Jacqueline Houtman sources that will help me provide historical or scientific context. I find quotes and anecdotes that will give the reader insights in to the lives of scientists. I fill my virtual and real-life desktops with everything I can learn about the subject. Somewhere in those stacks of paper and pixels, there is a story.

A story, whether fiction or nonfiction, is not just a series of events or facts strung together. Each element relates to the others in a cause-and-effect way to pull the reader along. I first find the heart of the story—the truth that needs to be conveyed. I build an outline based on the main points of that truth arranged in a logical order. Each paragraph builds on the information that precedes it, just as each scientific discovery builds on earlier work.

Once I have found the story and outlined the narrative, I fill it in.

Scientific papers have structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. In writing for a general audience, the same elements need to be included, without that strict structure. Each part of the story needs to have a motivation, a brief description of the methods the researchers used and what they found, as well as some idea of what it means and how it fits into the story. If I know of conflicts or obstacles, I add them for a more compelling read. Metaphors and analogies can help with comprehension.

Throughout the piece, I try to emphasize that science is a collaborative process. Headline-grabbing discoveries are made possible by years of basic research. Many scientists contribute their own findings, insights, and techniques to the body of work.

I want the article to be engaging rather than exhaustive. I resist the urge to add material that is not related to the main narrative. All that research I do? The vast majority of it does not end up in the finished piece. But that’s OK. I like to think of a quote from a letter written to Laura Ingalls Wilder by her daughter, Rose. “Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate it.”

—Jacqueline Houtman

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

35

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

W i sc o n s i n M I C R O B IO M E R E S E A R C H E R S FEDERICO REY

jo handelsman

Gut microbiota influence the way we respond to pathogens as well as how we metabolize the food that we eat and the drugs that we use. UW–Madison researcher Federico Rey is working to identify how the gastrointestinal tract’s microbiota can have an impact on how susceptible we are to cardiovascular disease. “Many components from our diet are first tasted by our gut microbes before they are absorbed by our body,” he says. “These diet-microbial interactions are mostly beneficial to us, but they can also be detrimental.”

Rey’s goal is to indentify potential strategies for therapeutic manipulation of beneficial gut microbiota.

The emerging field of metagenomics examines the genes of a population of microbes as a whole, allowing microbiologists to obtain DNA from microbial samples taken directly from the environment. Biochemist and W isconsin Academy Fellow Jo Handelsman coined the phrase metagenomics, which she described as “an analysis of a collection of similar but not identical items.” Her pioneering work using metagenomics and culture-based microbial analyses has resulted in the discovery of new antibiotics and insights into antibiotic resistance. In 2014, Handelsman was appointed Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy by President Obama.

Microbes form a barrier between the human body and the outside world. The microbes in our guts and on our skin and mucous membranes colonize these surfaces, preventing diseasecausing organisms from gaining a foothold by competing for nutrients and blocking attachment sites. They also secrete compounds that inhibit pathogens by altering the local environment (sometimes increasing acidity, for example) or directly antagonizing pathogens.

Animals raised in a germ-free environment are much more susceptible to infectious disease than their conventionally raised cohorts for another reason: the immune system is dependent on the normal microbiota for its development. It is believed that the microbes normally found in the gut teach the immune system to attack microbial invaders that may cause disease, while tolerating beneficial microbes.

ronment. The human digestive tract is an ecosystem, said Dubos, thereby forever changing the research conversation from Us Against Them to We’re All in This Together.

In 1964 Dubos wrote: “Our recent studies have revealed that there exists in normal animals an abundant and characteristic microflora, not only in the large intestine, but also in all the other parts of the digestive tract, including the mouth, the stomach, and the small intestine. These microorganisms should not be regarded merely as contaminants. Rather, they become so intimately associated with the various digestive organs that they form with them a well-defined ecosystem of which each component is influenced by the others, and by the environmental conditions.”

While there are many methods for distinguishing microbes from one another and then isolating samples of a specific microbe for further study, Dubos believed that the true character of microbes could not be discovered in this way. Microbes inhibit and enhance each others’ growth. They communicate with each other and alter their environments. Understanding the relationships is important but complicated work. The ecosystem model emphasized the interactions between organisms, but nobody knew what most of the microbes were. How can you study an ecosystem if you don’t know what most of the organisms are?

It would be like trying to study a forest by just looking at the squirrels.

From Battlefield to Ecosystem As a college student in France, René Dubos disliked chemistry and microbiology. After a chance meeting with Rutgers University biochemist Selman Waksman onboard a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1924, Dubos found himself intrigued and joined Waksman’s lab to study the relationship between soil microbes and their environment.

After finishing his doctoral degree, another chance meeting brought Dubos to Oswald Avery’s lab at the Rockefeller Institute. Like so many investigators before him (and many to follow), Dubos looked to the soil. He isolated several drugs from soil bacteria, including the antibiotic gramicidin. His success encouraged Waksman and others to investigate soil bacteria for antibiotics. Waksman discovered streptomycin and credited his former student, noting that “to obtain the desired results required an analytical mind, an original coordination of all the facts, and especially a new philosophy.”

The new philosophy to which Waksman refers is a paradigm shift in germ theory pioneered by Dubos: In contrast to the warlike model in which specific disease-causing microorganisms were “the enemy,” Dubos promoted a more complex model in which microbes interacted with each other as well as their envi36

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

A Sequence of Discovery Although Dubos’s concept of studying the microbiome as an ecosystem was groundbreaking, the technology to make this study possible did not exist in the mid-20th century. One major hurdle at the time was known as the Great Plate Count Anomaly.

The Great Plate Count Anomaly was found in the difference between the number of various bacteria in a sample (from a person’s skin or a lake, for example) counted directly under the microscope and the number of colonies that grew when this sample was transferred to an agar plate. Scientists could see many more microbes—sometimes a hundred times more—

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

sandra mclellan

margaret mcgall-ngai

UW–Milwaukee School of Freshwater Science professor Sandra McLellan is driven by human health and its relation to environmental processes. To better understand public health within city communities, the McLellan Lab tested the fecal matter at wastewater treatment plants in 71 cities in 31 different states around the United States. The microbes detected in these samples allowed the McLellan Lab researchers to project the population’s health characteristics, including factors such as diet, weight, disease, and mood with 81 to 89 percent accuracy. “With enough cities, we should be able to start associating demographic traits with particular groups of bacteria,” says McLellan.

UW–Madison professor and Human Microbiome Project contributor Margaret McFall-Ngai explores how the symbiotic relationship between people and bacteria sustains itself, especially in terms of human health, by studying the partnership between the tiny Hawaiian bobtail squid and the luminous bacterium called Vibrio fischeri that lives inside it.

McFall-Ngai offers an analogy of cities to help people better understand the variability of the essential microbial populations humans share. “San Francisco is uniquely San Francisco due to all its own characteristics. Yet there are groups of people living there—bakers, sanitation workers, police officers—that are common to almost all cities,” she says.

in the sample than they could cultivate in the lab. It seemed most microbes were viable but not cultivable in the lab. Since the only way to study them was to grow them in the lab, the majority of these microbes remained mystery organisms.

Vexed by the Great Plate Count Anomaly, a group of environmental microbiologists hypothesized that something in the environment from which they obtained their samples was missing in the lab culture. They devised methods to mimic the native environment by using chambers that allowed nutrients and other essential molecules—but not other organisms—to diffuse into the culture.

They also used “helper” organisms from the native environment to provide needed growth factors. For example, environmental iron cannot get into a bacterium unless it is bound to a bacterial product called a siderophore. Some microbes cannot make their own siderophores and must use those produced by other organisms to obtain their iron.

As technology progressed, some environmental microbiologists got past the cultivation problem by applying sensitive DNA-based technologies to study the genes of complex bacterial communities. This emerging field of metagenomics (also called community genomics, environmental genomics, or population genomics) examines the genes of a population of microbes as a whole, allowing microbiologists to obtain DNA from microbial samples taken directly from the environment without any culturing. The extracted DNA contains a mixture of genes from all the organisms in the sample. Specific genes can be analyzed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which makes millions of copies of specific sections of DNA between the short sections recognized by defined sequences called primers.

Environmental microbiologists used PCR to analyze a particular gene called 16S rDNA that encodes part of the protein-assembling ribosomes found in all bacterial cells. This gene has sections that are common to all bacteria, as well as highly variable sections, that together can be used to identify individual organisms and to see how closely related they are to each other. These investigators used 16S rDNA sequencing to identify the diverse microbes that occurred in the environment

and found evidence for many more different kinds of microbes than they were able to isolate or cultivate in the lab.

While the16S rDNA sequences provide a lot of information about different organisms, this gene is only one of millions found in uncultivable organisms about which we know very little.

Another kind of metagenomics (sometimes called shotgun metagenomics) is used to examine all the genes in a population.

Random genes in a sample taken directly from the environment are analyzed using an automated system that can quickly sequence vast numbers of genes. The new sequences can be compared to the sequences of known genes to guess their function or can be inserted into domesticated bacteria to verify their function. Because the number of different genes that can be found in a sample of this kind is so huge, advanced computational techniques, called bioinformatics, are needed to make sense of it all.

Metagenomics can tell us a lot. Named for pioneering genomic researcher J. Craig Venter, the Venter Institute is a multidisciplinary genomic-focused organization with more than 250 scientists and staff. In a 2010 study directed by Venter Institute president and researcher Karen E. Nelson, the fecal DNA from two healthy adults was sequenced by the 16S rDNA and shotgun metagenomic methods. The study revealed that the metabolic potential of the microbes in the intestines was significantly greater than that of human cells alone. The authors described humans as “superorganisms,” which use both host and microbe functions to obtain energy and nutrients from food, to synthesize vitamins and amino acids, and to break down drugs and toxins.

Many Paths to a Healthy Microbiome Even without knowing exactly what organisms are in the microbiome, evidence continues to mount that they have profound effects on human health. Yet, the question remains: What is a healthy microbiome?

The variations between individuals, laboratories, techniques, and protocols make it difficult to answer this question. To what extent are the differences biologically relevant—associated with W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

37

s c i e n c e & h u ma n h e al t h

health or disease—or simply natural variation? A systemic way to answer the question would be a huge undertaking and would require a coordinated effort from many researchers.

But there was a precedent for accomplishing such an enormous task. In 2003, the first complete sequence of human genes was published and hailed as a milestone of scientific discovery.

This Human Genome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy, took thirteen years, cost about three billion dollars, and required the cooperation of many universities and other research institutions. As the project proceeded, scientists recognized that human genes are only part what constitutes life in a human body. To complete the picture, the human microbial genome would also need to be sequenced.

Great leaps in technological advances allow us to proceed in ways not possible even a decade or two ago; for example, by the time the Human Microbiome Project began in 2007 the human genome could be sequenced within days in a single lab at a cost of about $1,000.

The first phase of the five-year Human Microbiome Project (HMP) coordinated the work of over 200 researchers in 80 institutions. The study was designed to compare the microbiomes at multiple body sites over a large number of people and to look at changes in individual microbiomes over time. The goal was to construct a reference database of sequences for the genes of all the organisms in the samples, both the cultivable and the (much more numerous) uncultivable microbes. Standardized procedures were created to minimize sampling differences between laboratories.

The HMP study, also funded by the NIH, recruited 300 subjects (149 men and 151 women), ages 18 to 40. Since the purpose of the study was to find out what constitutes a healthy microbiome, people with certain medical conditions were excluded from the study. Participants were instructed to refrain from using certain medications and were given a kit of personal care products to use for a period before the study. Samples were then taken from the skin (behind each ear and inside each elbow), the soft tissue of the mouth, the teeth above and below the gumline, the nostrils and, from women, the vagina. Subjects also provided saliva and stool samples. Some subjects gave samples two or three times over the course of the study to see if (and how) their organisms changed over time.

Once the difficult work of collecting samples and subject information was accomplished, there was even more complex work: processing and sequencing the samples. To identify and classify the organisms, investigators used the 16S rDNA method. Shotgun metagenomic analysis was used to determine the potential functions of the genes in the microbial community. The end result was a mountain of data that required serious computer power and new kinds of bioinformatics.

On June 13, 2012, NIH director Francis Collins announced the completion of a reference database constructed from 5,000 samples. They identified at least 10,000 distinct microorganisms and eight million microbial genes—360 times as many microbial genes as human genes. The main finding was that there are many different microbiomes that are considered healthy. The individual genetic signatures of the microbiomes vary widely between individuals. Metabolic function is more important than 38

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

microbial composition—that is, what they do is more important than who they are. If a microbiome is disrupted (by antibiotics, for example), it can eventually move back to a healthy state, but perhaps not with the identical microbial species. The database also revealed that knowing what is “normal” and being able to diagnose or treat a condition or disease based on the microbiota present are two very different things.

Using the data generated by the Human Microbiome Project, research continues on the effects of the microbiome on human health, especially in the gut, which has strong connections to the immune system, the nervous system, and other aspects of health and disease. The potential uses of the data generated by the Human Microbiome Project have yet to be fully realized, but it is clear that it will be a valuable resource for future research.

A New Frontier Because of the work of countless researchers and myriad advances in technology, we now think about the organisms that share our bodies not as invaders but as integral parts of ourselves. Using new technologies and borrowing strategies from other disciplines, we are learning what constitutes a healthy microbiome and beginning to understand how changes in our personal ecosystems can affect our health. New discoveries, built upon knowledge from seemingly unrelated research, may lead to new treatments for a variety of disorders.

Since Dubos and Waksman isolated antibiotics from soil bacteria, more than 50,000 products of environmental microorganisms have been identified. The human microbiome has enormous potential as a source of novel drugs and treatments. New technologies such as genetic engineering and synthetic chemistry are allowing scientists to isolate products of organisms in the environment and in the human body without cultivating them in the laboratory. In addition, a more thorough understanding of the organisms and their growth requirements will expand our knowledge of the workings of the human body—a place that is, in the words of Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, “one of the most important ecosystems on the planet.”

Our exploration of this ecosystem has just begun. Z

The original version of this article first appeared in the March 2015 edition of Breakthroughs in Bioscience, a series developed by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental B i o l o g y ( FA S E B ) i n o rd e r t o educate the general public about the benefits of fundamental biomedical research.

Visit faseb.org/breakthroughs to read more from the Breakthroughs in Bioscience series.

WWW.WISC.EDU This message furnished by the University of Wisconsin–Madison

Wis People and Places ad.indd 1

6/2/15 2:10 PM

F R A N K L LOY D W R I G H T ’ S

WWW.WISC.EDU

S P R I N G G R E E N , W I S CO N S I N

THIS MESSAGE FURNISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON

14310-UW-Print_8.375x10.875.indd 1

9/30/14 12:57 PM

“the greatest single building in America”

- architecture critic Robert Campbell

Tour, Shop & Dine / April – November

W W W.TA L I E S I N P R E S E RVAT I O N .O R G

essay

The Resurrection of the Lord God Bird

by B . J . Ho l l a r s

A

fter six months of searching, I stumble upon the last ivory-billed woodpecker the world has ever known.

Though, admittedly, what I find in a file folder at a museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, hardly qualifies as an ivory-billed woodpecker. It isn’t exactly flesh, blood, and feathers, after all. Rather, it’s a seventy-

year-old drawing of the last of its kind.

And, too, when I use the phrase “the last ivory-billed woodpecker” in describing what I find, I’m asking you to disregard the seven or so sightings of ivory-billed woodpeckers in Arkansas between 2004 and 2005, one of which resulted in four seconds of blurry video proof that the bird still exists.

Or at least proof enough for some.

After sixty years of little more than a handful of alleged sightings, one cool February day in 2004, kayaker Gene Sparling took to the Cache River near Brinkley, Arkansas, and glimpsed a bird thought to be extinct.

He posted a description of what he’d seen on an online message board and was soon contacted by Tim Gallagher, an ivory bill expert and editor of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s quarterly magazine, Living Bird.

Gallagher, accompanied by his friend and fellow ivory bill aficionado, Bobby Harrison, soon found themselves paddling the Cache alongside Sparling for a search that—almost unbelievably—yielded yet another sighting. Gallagher and Harrison watched as the bird darted across the bayou toward a nearby tupelo tree.

“Look at the white on its wings!” Gallagher cried, and Harrison did, confirming the feature that most distinguished the ivory-billed woodpecker from its smaller, commonplace cousin, the pileated woodpecker.

The pair compared notes, and, after corroborating their individual stories, Gallagher called home to report the news to his wife, journalist Rachel Dickinson.

“Had I known then that I was going to have to keep the biggest conservation secret of the past century to myself for almost fourteen months,” Dickinson later wrote in a piece for Audubon, “I might have asked him not to divulge any of the details.”

What happened next seemed more like a Hollywood thriller than a scientific birding expedition. Calls were made, important people were brought “into the know,” and within weeks the New Yorkbased Cornell Lab had partnered with a local chapter of the Nature Conservancy to begin work on the vaguely named “Arkansas Inventory Project,” whose secret mission it was to find further evidence of the bird’s re-emergence.

For fourteen months a tight-lipped group of scientists and researchers continued their quest until April of 2005, when the U.S. Department of the Interior hosted a press conference to announce the Arkansas Inventory Project’s findings.

As the cameras rolled, Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick took to the microphone, making clear both the cultural and scientific importance of finding a living ivory-billed woodpecker.

“This is no ordinary bird to the 70 million Americans who are birdwatchers,”

he explained. “This Holy Grail is really the most spectacular creature we could imagine rediscovering.”

At the press conference, U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns gleefully announced a “multi-year, multi-milliondollar partnership” to “aid the rare bird’s survival.”

Scientists and ornithologists cheered the good news—even if, for some, the rare bird’s survival seemed a little too good to be true. Skeptics questioned the accuracy of the sightings, and some even argued that, even if a handful of ivory-bills had been found, the species was as good as extinct in light of the shrinking lowland forest habitat.

We’d tried saving the ivory-billed woodpecker before: first, by way of ornithologist James Tanner’s 1942 book The Ivory Billed Woodpecker, then two years later, through the brushstrokes of a wildlife painter named Don Eckelberry.

Though both their efforts would serve as fitting elegies for the soon-to-be-extinct bird, neither man’s work was strong enough to stave off what seemed an inevitable loss of a species.

A

t roughly twenty inches in length and thirty inches in wingspan, the ivory-billed woodpecker is one of the largest wood-

Opposite page: Sketches from Don Eckelberry’s 1944 field journal, provided courtesy of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, provide the backdrop for John James Audubon’s magnificent illustration of the ivory-billed woodpecker from Birds of America (1927–1938).

40

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

essay

peckers in the world. Known for its eponymous ivory-colored bill—not to mention the male’s scarlet crest—it has long been called “the Lord God Bird,” so nicknamed for the phrase often uttered upon seeing its imposing form.

In his early-19th century masterpiece, Birds of America, John James Audubon wrote of the bird’s beauty and power: It seldom comes near the ground, but prefers at all times the tops of the tallest trees. Should it, however, discover the half-standing broken shaft of a large dead and rotten tree, it attacks it in such a manner as nearly to demolish it in the course of a few days.

I have seen the remains of some of these ancient monarchs of our forests so excavated, and that so singularly, that the tottering fragments of the trunk appeared to be merely supported by the great pile of chips by which its base was surrounded. The strength of this Woodpecker is such, that I have seen it detach pieces of bark seven or eight inches in length at a single blow of its powerful bill, and by beginning at the top branch of a dead tree, tear off the bark, to an extent of twenty or thirty feet, in the course of a few hours, leaping downwards with its body in an upward position, tossing its head to the right and left, or leaning it against the bark to ascertain the precise spot where the grubs were concealed, and immediately after renewing its blows with fresh vigor, all the while sounding its loud notes, as if highly delighted.

As the ivory bill population dwindled, a group of researchers from Cornell University set out in 1935 to gather what information they could about the onceabundant bird. Among the small group was graduate student James Tanner, who dedicated over 21 months and 45,000 miles to tracking the ivory bill.

I imagine it proved to be a mostly thankless task of peering into empty nesting holes again and again. After all that time and all those miles, the only thing Tanner had to show for himself were observations from the same six ivory bills, all of whom took refuge in Louisiana’s Singer Tract, a 130,000-acre swath of ancient forest owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

Despite a lackluster showing by the ivory bills, the research was enough to help Tanner pen the definitive book on the species, rather than, ecologically speaking, closing the book on them altogether. Published by the National Audubon Society in 1942, Tanner’s The Ivory Billed Woodpecker opens with a general description of the elusive bird and offers an extensive profile of characteristics, including its feeding, nesting, and breeding habits as well as the bird’s original distribution patterns and a chronology of its decline.

Through his writing, Tanner would become for the ivory bills what Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax was for the trees: an outspoken advocate. Though Tanner’s tone remains scientific throughout The Ivory Billed Woodpecker, his prose occasionally reflects his frustration and helplessness:

In their heyday—and by heyday I mean in the 1800s, prior to the removal of 98% of native forest habitat that once covered 24 million acres—ivory-billed woodpeckers were considered “abundant” by Audubon, inhabiting swampland forests from Memphis to Little Rock to Houston and beyond.

Yet the once abundant bird became far less so after the lumber industry began to denude the lowland hardwood forest of the southeastern United States. To a lesser extent, hunters, too, played a role in the bird’s decline by emptying trees for hat feathers or to fill the cabinets of curiosities of wealthy patrons.

Indeed, by 1942 the capacity to increase the number of remaining ivory bills was largely out of human hands. Though, we still had some choice as to what to do next if—as Tanner implied—we decided to do anything at all.

42

P E O P L E

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

Large numbers are not necessary for the continued existence of the ivory bill. Even though it would be better and more promising if the birds were more abundant, still they are not, and if we are to make any attempt to save the species, we must be satisfied in starting with a few individuals.

&

I D E A S

T

he first time wildlife artist Don Eckelberry came face to face with an ivory bill, the bird staring back was already dead. He was just a boy then, and the rare specimen was a gift to the Louisiana Department of Conservation.

“It was a big woodpecker,” Eckelberry recalled years later, “larger than a crow, strikingly patterned black and white, with a long scarlet crest and a prodigious ivory-white beak.”

What Eckelberry didn’t know then was that in 1944 he would see yet another ivory bill, wild and alive in the Singer Tract, even as the woods were being deforested by the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. As a result, Eckelberry would hold the dubious honor of being the last person to have a universally accepted sighting of the species.

His eyes were the last eyes to see her eyes, which Eckelberry described as “hysterical” and “pale.”

For years Audubon Society President John Baker had been working on a deal with the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company to save at least part of the Singer Tract. In 1940, Baker asked Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender to introduce a bill to establish the Tensas Swamp National Park as a way to preserve a 60,000-acre section of the tract. Baker secured pledges of support for the bill from the heads of the U. S. Forestry Services, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. He even received an endorsement for the bill from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It wasn’t enough.

At a 1943 meeting between Chicago Mill president James Griswold and his counsel and Louisiana wildlife officials, Governor Sam Jones, John Baker, and other interested parties, Griswold bluntly stated that they were not willing to even discuss any plans that would interfere with plans to complete the cutting of the Singer Tract in accordance with their contract rights.

Sensing the probable demise of the Tensas Swamp National Park bill, Baker immediately dispatched Audubon staffer Richard Pough to the Singer Tract, hopeful that an ivory-billed woodpecker sighting might renew public interest.

essay

Approximate Boundary of Singer Tract

John’s Bayou

Horseshoe Lake

Nest site Roost tree Record out of usual range

Little Methiglum

Despair Bayou

Approximate Boundary of Singer Tract

Despair Lake

Mack’s Bayou Little Rainey Lake Bear Wallow

Greenlea Bend

AS

Cross Bayou

Sharkey Plantation

Alligator Bayou (East Prong)

Mack’s Bayou

Hunter’s Bend

Titepaper

Foster’s Place

Lake Nick

Ayer’s Tract

McGill Bend

Road

Lake Carter

Alligator Bayou

S

Dishroom Bend

Sharkey

Andrew’s Bend

RIV ER

John’s Bayou

g

TE NS

Little Bear Lake

in pr

To Indian Lakes

Methiglum Bayour

Bayou

Big Rainey Lake

Mill’s Bayou

Tensas Region (principally the Singer Tract) Madison Parish, NE Louisiana

Half Half Mile Mile

One Mile

Above: The portion of the Singer Tract along the Tensas River in Northern Louisiana where Tanner and Eckelberry found the few remaining ivory-billed woodpeckers.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

43

essay

From early December 1943 to midJanuary 1944, Pough spotted only a single female ivory bill.

A despondent Baker sent Audubon artist Don Eckelberry to meet Pough in the hopes of preserving what he could of the Singer Tract female through sketches.

For two weeks Eckelberry tracked her, writing and sketching every last detail.

He went where she went—taking a boat upriver past Alligator Bayou, then a car to John’s Bayou—and even began loitering around the roost tree, his ear cocked and awaiting the sound of her call.

The ivory-billed woodpecker’s call note is a nasal sound reminiscent of the tooting of a toy horn. Some people refer to it as the “kent” call because it sounds as though the bird is saying, kent, kent, kent.

His first encounter occurred at 6:46 pm on April 5th. There, amid the downy and the red-bellied woodpeckers, came the woodpecker that mattered most, her wings, according to Eckelberry “cleaving the air in strong, direct flight.”

Reaching for pencil and pad, Eckelberry took all the notes that he could, watching her preen, rap, then bounce about the roost hole before entering, exiting, and— after one final five minute flyby—enter her roost for the night.

Eckelberry, who’d taken up temporary residence with a Louisianan he’d pseudonymously named Mr. Henry, could occasionally be found on the back porch alongside his host, watching the deer emerge from the darkened forest.

But as his ivory bill searching days wore on, Eckelberry became equally well-

eventy years removed from Eckelberry’s time in the Singer Tract, I make the hundred-mile drive due east from Eau Claire to Wausau to see that bird for myself. Or at least what’s left of her.

I arrive at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum—internationally known for its annual Birds in Art exhibition—at a few minutes before 8:00 am and knock on the broad glass door.

The museum doesn’t open for an hour, but my guide, curator of collections Jane Weinke, offers me a private, early morning tour of the galleries. She allows me to linger in the gallery that holds Legacy Lost & Saved: Extinct and Endangered Birds of North America, the exhibition that spurred my visit. The gallery walls are filled with everything the skies are not: passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, even the great auk himself.

“What do you hope this exhibition reveals to people? Is there a conservation message?” I ask Jane as we stroll around the gallery.

She ponders this, and says, “I think just by being here, seeing the artwork and reading the extended labels, it gets people thinking.”

44

P E O P L E

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

acquainted with Mr. Henry’s housekeeper, a woman named Liza who warned him against exploring the forests after dark, that the woods were “full of haunts.”

“But the only spirit I could hear,” Eckelberry wrote, “was the voice of doom for this entire natural community, epitomized by that poor, lone ivory bill.”

S

&

I D E A S

I nod my head in agreement, but my eyes are on Eckelberry’s original April 1944 field notes, framed and hanging in two horizontal rows in the corner of the gallery.

“These are them?” I ask, my nose inches from the glass. “His original notes?”

Jane nods as I squint to read Eckelberry’s poetic descriptions of the “vine draped trunks against the blue-green sky” and the “willows standing waist deep in muddy water.” I read also how the “softshelled turtles sun on logs” and how the barred owl “flushes from its streamside home.”

But his notes capture more than mere backdrop, and on the page dated April 5th—the day of his first sighting— Eckelberry offers nothing short of a play-by-play of his encounter.

6:33 Kent-kent—5 times and double knock- 2-3 6:45 2 more double knocks…

I already know how this story ends, and yet I read his notes in great anticipation, my eyes running along the ivory bill’s Morse code: kent-kent, double-knock, kent-kent.

I turn my attention to his notes from April 11th: About 5:30—KENT! Double rap while walking Through small uncut area about 1/3 mile from rd. Found her immediately.

I reread the phrase that was surely never uttered again—Found her immediately.

essay “Plenty more where that came from,” Jane says. “We’ve got his sketches, too, right upstairs.”

I turn to her, dumbfounded.

“We inherited quite a lot,” she says with a wan smile.

U

pstairs in Jane’s office, several sets of black filing cabinets occupy the far side of the room, numerous drawers of which are dedicated to Don Eckelberry.

“We’ve got just about every letter he ever wrote, and every letter ever written to him,” she says, pointing to manila folders containing correspondences between Eckelberry and any number of artists, editors, and friends.

Tucked into one folder are the sketches I most hoped to see: eight of them, each of which offers a new look at our long-lost girl.

I flip wide the folder, holding in my hands the last-known sketches of the last-known ivory-billed woodpecker. The sketches are rough, though they offer far more visual detail than the field notes hanging in the gallery below our feet.

There is her crest, her ivory-colored bill, her wings carefully folded to her sides.

In one sketch there are actually two of her; or, rather, two views, Eckelberry managing to double the species’ entire population by way of a few extra pencil strokes.

Though most of his sketches depict the ivory bill on her roost tree, the one I admire most is her portrait; her neck sprung back in perpetual hold, as if preparing to debark a cypress branch. There is the white stripe of her neck, which, if followed, leads directly to her beak.

When Eckelberry drew this ivory bill she still breathed, rapped, had the good sense to fly away. On paper she remains motionless—not a blur or a flash, just an image—as if she’d willingly posed for him.

Though Eckelberry had described her “hysterical pale eyes,” in this portrait all I see is calm. Or resignation, maybe, for a prophecy not yet fulfilled.

I stand in that office for half an hour or so, fully aware that this is likely as close to the Lord God Bird as I’ll ever get. I hear no kent calls, no double raps; just the silence that always comes in between.

Or after. Z W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

45

at the james watrous gallery

T h e A r t o f D a v id M c L ima n s

by Lo r r i e M oo r e

I

first met David McLimans the summer of 2001, on a blind date at the Greenbush Bar six weeks after my divorce was finished—done and dusted, as the Irish say— and six weeks before 9/11.

I had been told, somewhat misleadingly, that David was a commercial illustrator. The only commercial illustrator I’d ever known was a man in Connecticut who had drawn the image of Pepperidge Farm that now appears on all the Pepperidge Farm packages. I prepared myself for I don’t know what: someone more superficial, more garrulous, more commercial than the man I met.

David was handsome and shy, wearing ivory shorts, an ivory camp shirt, and German sandals, sitting at the bar with a beer: Madison was in a hot spell, yet there was something very cool about him even in the heat, a dashing dash of the spiritually self-exiled Green Bay lad. (Well, he was a silver fox and women were mad for him—not to put too fine a point on it.)

We found ourselves a table and more beer and spoke about being artists in Madison. I kept wondering why our paths had never crossed before (perhaps because we were both quasi-hermits, in our houses doing our work). He spoke of his appreciation of maps and postage stamps as aesthetic objects, of his time in the Navy, of his daughter, Hannah; the full range of his artistic talent and his deep, quick, offbeat sense of humor slowly began to reveal themselves.

That week I mailed him a book on cartography, a bunch of foreign stamps that had come in from European publishers, and a sheet of USPS special-issue illustrator stamps, asking him which illustrator he liked best. His choice was Rockwell Kent, who had illustrated Melville’s leviathan. Perhaps this was apt, given David’s history with sea creatures and boats and strong, figurative drawing.

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

James WAtrous Gallery A place to explore and learn about art from Wisconsin, the Academy’s James Watrous Gallery shares the work of Wisconsin artists past and present and investigates ideas at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters. Free and open to the public, the Watrous Gallery is located on the third floor of Overture Center for the Arts in downtown Madison. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for upcoming Watrous Gallery exhibitions and events.

Opposite page: David McLimans and friend, 2009.

Photograph by Joseph Blough. Copyright © 2010 by JB Patrick Flynn W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

47

at the james watrous gallery

Found Faces, 2014. Mixed media. Published by The Lodge as a cover for The Notbook 2015.

On the morning of September 11th I was at David’s house— whose walls were hung with surprising, intricate art (his own)—and the phone rang. We turned on the television and spent the day dumbfounded. Disoriented from all directions that evening we still wanted to be together and stupidly thought we’d go to the movies—only to find every cinema in Madison closed. Not quite as a consequence (though we were both seeking comfort) for the next decade we remained more or less romantically involved. I was crazy about him. (“You’ve done well,” my mother said when she met David. A photo of him is still on her fridge and on mine as well.)

Despite the world news over those horrible Bush years— to which David’s art responded, in picture after picture—his house felt like a sanctuary; it’s proximity to the cemetery between Franklin Street and Speedway Road making it both peaceful and ironic, a source of comedy (“just catapult me in there from here,” he would say). David’s house continued to be a calming place: the main room taken up with its large desk in the alcove and the dining table too used for projects, its surface mottled with ink blots and paper cuttings; he was still not using the computer back then but making handcut collages that were picked up at day’s end by Fed Ex and sent to Harper’s, The Washington Post, The New York Times, whomever had commissioned them.

In the summers, if we had rented a lake house together, he combed the beaches for stones (including diamonds that the glacier or Capone might have left behind). David occasionally dumpster-dived, and on trash nights he strolled, alert and surveying, when people put their flotsam on the curb; he made sculpture from his plunder. Everything he did was done with great care and beauty: an ingeniously wrapped gift, an arrangement of wildflowers, a simple meal.

I had never met anyone with such a careful hand and sharp aesthetic eye in all that he did. I had once dated a painter who All artwork copyright © 2014 by David McLimans

48

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

used to say, when cooking, “This may look like vomit but it’s going to be delicious.” Yet with David everything was exquisite from the start: a pizza with golden raisins resembled a rococo ceiling fresco. A meticulously chopped stir-fry or simple ad hoc salad with apples and basil (which I often still try to imitate) proved inimitable.

I saved every birthday or valentine card he ever made for me. In addition I have several beautiful black and white prints, a few collages, a sculpture of a bird made in part from a handyman’s level and the neck scroll of a violin, coffee mugs decorated with his distinctive primitive graphic—some drawn with a single line spinning maniacally around the cup.

For David, everything was full of music, pattern, motion: he often listened to jazz while working. (And going to hear jazz, especially when we travelled, was one of our great pleasures together.) David’s house had leaded glass windows, lending a graphic dimension to his rooms and to the views outside, some lost in the trees, like a tree fort.

And there is a way of looking at his artwork (especially that which he did for Patrick Flynn who commissioned from David illustrations for The Progressive, Rethinking Schools, and finally The Baffler) that imposes a window on the composition: something is looking in—poverty, war, ecological death—and other times someone is looking out: upon a classroom, a city, race relations, human or corporate activity.

Visual puns abound. Even when handling bleak subjects there was often a liveliness to his work. His color scheme for a long spell utilized only what David called “true colors”—primary and secondary—a refusal to participate in the murk of mauve or smoky teal was his aesthetic (and he once painted his kitchen accordingly).

Master of the stark contrast and the tribal zig-zag, David loved reflections and reversals, yin and yang, and if dyslexia in artists is not a handicap but a gift, as many people now

at the james watrous gallery

Jazz Composition, 1993. Paper collage. Published in the Chicago Tribune.

believe, he used his to great advantage and abandon, creating intricate patterns of mirrored reflections and flipped silhouettes. He incorporated typographic forms abstractly; yet from these he conjured pure, bold design.

From the beginning we had spoken of children’s books because David had a hankering to do one and was being encouraged by his friends. I had done a children’s book myself—a very unimpressive one—which I showed him, and I like to think its unimpressiveness helped inspire him.

Still, when I saw the first mock-up pages of Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet I was astounded. He had taken his interest in typography and nature and wedded them in a stunningly original alphabet book about endangered animal species. I felt proud to know him and said so. I put him in touch with my literary agent, who sold the book to a small imprint called Walker Books, and when Gone Wild was published and then selected by The New York Society of Illustrators as one of their books of the year we went to New York to see the exhibit there. Looking around I knew, and said to David, that there was nothing as remotely good as his book in the whole place and that he was going to win a Caldecott, one of the most prestigious children’s book awards.

“Don’t jinx it,” he said.

“OK,” I said, “You’re going to win a teeny tiny little hardly anything.”

The New York Times listed Gone Wild as one of the ten best illustrated books of the year. And in January 2007 the Association for Library Service to Children awarded David with one of their two Caldecott Honors. We went to Washington DC in the spring for the ceremony, and, when his name was announced, David hilariously leapt in a single bound onto

the stage, directly from the floor, showing off his springy knees and general spryness: he was a little self-conscious about being the oldest author there and wanted to show off a little.

To me he seemed eternal.

David went on to do more picture books, all of them beautiful, and the second one, Gone Fishing, he dedicated to my son, Ben (Gone Wild was dedicated to Hannah).

David was great with kids, full of physical and verbal comedy—he would make a quip then take a pratfall—and his books were all dedicated to the children he knew best. He had started to become a popular visitor to schools and children’s museums. He produced three children’s books in all but he had several ideas for others, including an amazing one in draft called “The Big House” (inspired somewhat by his father’s work in prison) which was begun long ago but never completed.

At its end our relationship loitered near various permutations of friendship. The afternoon he died, we had been e-mailing in the morning. I was teaching in Tennessee. Time had flown, happily and unhappily: I had attended his daughter’s high school graduation, then her college graduation; he had watched ten years of my son’s soccer games in both local and faraway parks. What he sent me that morning were the Harper’s illustrations he’d done for a book review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. They were intricate map collages of animal skulls, each one a seer’s face of precise environmental catastrophe peering in at the windows.

They made his death later that day all that much more unbelievable. Z

Turn the page to see the artwork of David McLimans W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

49

at the james watrous gallery

Environmental Production, 2000. Ink on paper. Published by the Washington Post.

50

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

at the james watrous gallery

The Asshole and the Earthworm, 2005. Ink on paper. Published by The Perishable Press.

Lovers, 2001. Ink on paper. Promotional/personal work.

Mechanic, 1990. Ink on paper. Published in The Progressive’s Hidden History of the United States 1991 calendar.

All artwork copyright Š 2014 by David McLimans

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

51

at the james watrous gallery

Frog (map), 2013. Map and mixed media collage.

52

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

at the james watrous gallery

Human Skull, Bird Skull, and Gorilla Skull, 2014, Map and mixed media collage. Published in Harper’s.

Journalism, 2009. Map and mixed media collage. Published in the New York Times.

All artwork copyright Š 2014 by David McLimans

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

53

at the james watrous gallery

Buying Silence, 1992. Mixed media collage.

Published in The Progressive.

Corp. Bed, 1995. Mixed media collage. Published in The Progressive.

Socialism, 1993. Ink on mixed media collage. Published in The Progressive.

54

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

at the james watrous gallery

Lineup. Wood sculpture with fish jaw, fur, and knot head.

Bug. Found parts sculpture.

Wheel Head. Wood sculpture surfaced with text collage and found wheel.

All artwork copyright Š 2014 by David McLimans

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

55

at the james watrous gallery

Ink on paper illustrated letter forms from the David McLimans book Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet, a Caldicott Honor Award book published by Walker & Company, 2006.

Illustration (two-page spread) from the David McLimans book Big Turtle, published by Walker & Company, 2011.

56

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

at the james watrous gallery

Goddess (map), 2013. Map and mixed media collage.

All artwork copyright © 2014 by David McLimans

CONNECT:

At the James Watrous Gallery

GONE WILD: David McLimans On view July 17–August 23, 2015 GONE WILD: David McLimans at the James Watrous Gallery features a selection of the artist’s exquisite collages, gently humorous sculptures made with found materials, and sophisticated editorial illustrations. McLimans’ three children’s books will also be on display, including Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet (2007), recognized as a Caldecott Honor Medalist and New York Times Illustrated Book of the Year. In honor of McLimans’ playful approach to making art, the exhibit includes a children’s table and an opportunity for visitors to create ephemeral masks with McLimans’ stash of found materials and photograph them to share on social media.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more information.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

spring / s u mmer

2 0 1 5

57

read WI

READ WISCONSIN Congratulations to the winners of our 2015 fiction and poetry contests

Nikki Kallio 1st Place Fiction

Erica Kanesaka Kalnay 2nd Place Fiction

Kathryn Gahl 3rd Place Fiction

Lisa Vihos 1st Place Poetry

Sean Avery 2nd Place Poetry

Kathleen Dale 3rd Place Poetry

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

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

This year, preliminary judges Elizabeth Wyckoff and Zachary Carlson helped us to screen almost 600 poetry submissions, while CX Dillhunt whittled down the finalists to about 50 poems for consideration by lead judge and poet Kara Candito.

This year the fiction contest lead judge was author Nicholas Butler and I, along with Academy colleague Aaron Fai, acted as

58

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

preliminary judges. The fiction contest received 82 submissions.

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

I'd like to thank our lead and preliminary judges for volunteering their time and efforts to the 2015 contest, and offer a special thanks to 2015 contest sponsors Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts, Wisconsin Public Radio, and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Most important, thanks to everyone who participated in the 2015 contests. I'm continually amazed by and proud of our state's poets and writers. Keep on writing and Wisconsin People & Ideas will keep on supporting your craft.

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

Too, don't forget to join us for a showcase reading featuring the winners from both our 2015 fiction and poetry contests at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Friday, October 23, at 5:30 pm in the cozy confines of A Room of One's Own Bookstore, 305 West Gorham Street, in Madison. I hope to see you there. —Jason A. Smith, editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

read WI

Wisconsin People & Ideas 2015 Short Story Contest

Geography Lesson

By Nikki Kallio

H

e paced down the inner corridor, heading to the place he thought she might be, rolling a piece of sea glass in his hand. Odd, maybe, that he still panicked when she went missing, because she could never really be lost. At least they hadn’t left their human instincts behind.

It wasn’t the first time he had found her here. She was too smart to be captivated for long in the classroom with the other children—no, she wanted to find her own answers.

“Have you been here the whole time?”

She looked so small, her skinny kid limbs folded on the floor in the adults’ library, paging through the old books.

The other children preferred to keep themselves occupied with animal films and flying games or pressing their faces against the viewing portals and watching the stars go by. But Fiona was so much like her mother, or the mother she would have had. Maybe it was one of the

worst things, that he couldn’t satisfy her curiosity.

He thumbed the piece of sea glass, his talisman, his worry stone.

“Don’t you want to be on the field trip with the other children?”

“No. I’ve seen the goats.”

“What are you looking at?”

She looked up at him from the old green volume, one of his own that he’d contributed to the library. They had only brought about four thousand printed books, but also had in electronic storage every book that had ever been digitized.

He loved the printed books like Fiona’s mother had loved them, but every time he saw them he wondered about the W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

weight and the space and whether they could’ve brought more people instead.

But they needed a history. They needed a history and a culture to bring with them from Earth. Without those things they were flesh and bone and brain matter and excrement.

She showed him the page she was on.

Bergerac \'ber-zhǝ- rak\. Commune, ' Dordogne dept., SW cen. France, on Dordogne river 25 m. SSW of Périgueux; pop. (1968c) 27,165; wine; 19th cent.

Gothic church; captured by English 1345 and fortified; taken by French 1450.

Bergkamen \berk-'käm-ǝn\. City, North Rhine-Westpahlia, West Germany, 10 m. &

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

59

read WI NE of Dortmund: pop. (1969e) 43,585;

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

coal mining; chemicals.

u

2015 Fiction Contest First-place winner Nikki Kallio is a fiction writer and journalist who has worked in Wisconsin, Maine, and California.

Kallio earned her MFA degree in creative writing from Goddard College, and her work has appeared in Pitkin Review, Minerva Rising, Midwestern Gothic, and Rawboned. She has taught fiction in Appleton at Fox Valley Technical College and The Mill: A Place for Writers, the latter of which awarded her the 2014 Mill Prize for Fiction. Kallio is currently editing her first novel, a post-apocalyptic tale set in rural Wisconsin.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Nickolas Butler: Post apocalyptic stories have certainly captured the attention of our culture lately, but it seems to me that "Geography Lesson" is a very focused, nuanced story that is mostly interested in the notion of "home" and "homelessness." Now that the world has been destroyed, how do we maintain our very humanity; is humanity directly related to our residence on Earth? The connection to Wisconsin feels both whimsical and surreal. This is a very fine story.

60

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

I want a baby, Leah had told him.

They’d gone camping just after the call came, before the public announcement. They decided to go to the ocean.

They were standing on a high rocky ridge surrounded by tall pines and he wished he could remember the scent of those trees. He could remember the way the strong wind barely moved them, but he couldn’t smell them anymore.

He remembered the misty ocean droplets on his cheekbones, but he couldn’t remember the salty fish smell of the water. Intellectually he remembered how it smelled, but he couldn’t conjure the scent. It was there that Leah had found the piece of sea glass and pressed it into his palm.

He had held her tighter, feeling suddenly tiny, a molecule in a cavernous maw of unpredictable space.

You’re mad, he had said. You want to watch it burn to death with everyone else?

An embryo, she said. We’ll send it with the others.

He remembered how her hair had twisted around his neck in the wind, but he couldn’t remember the smell of her hair.

u Bodie Island Bodinayakkanur Bodkin Point Bodø \`bō-,dǝr\. Seaport,  of Nordland co. N Norway, ab. 100 m. SW of Narvik; pop. (1970e) 28,545; trade center; shipping point for copper ore and marble; tourist resort, with the midnight sun from June 1 to July 12.

“How can the sun shine at midnight?” Fiona asked.

“It depends where you are on the planet,” he said.

“You said it’s dark at midnight, just like they make it on the ship.”

“Not always. That’s not always true.”

She l ooked at him as if she was assessing everything he had ever told her, deciding fact by fact whether or not there might be exceptions.

“What is a tourist resort?” she asked.

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

“It’s a place where people visit.”

“Are we tourists?”

“No,” he said. “We’re refugees. We can’t go back home.”

u They had argued for months about it and finally he agreed. He came to understand that it was Leah’s way of keeping herself alive, even if the government wouldn’t give her the golden ticket that would save her life.

Golden ticket. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He would make sure Fiona knew about the book and he would show her the film, the original. How much of what he knew culturally would be passed on to her, to the other children?

Oompa loompa, doom-pa-dee do. I’ve got nothing at all to give you. All of the fragmented references would become nonsensical to them. They would make their own references and inside jokes.

Their own proverbs and insults.

Put it where the sun don’t shine. No one of Fiona’s generation would understand the joke because now it meant put it anywhere.

u Bodrum, a seaport. SW Turkey in Asia.

“What’s SW?” “Southwest.”

“What does that mean?”

He pulled up the holographic globe of Earth and it gently rotated over the table. He stopped it and showed her.

“You’re here. Anywhere. This is north.

This is south, east, west. So, southwest.

No matter where you are, if you go this way, it’s southwest.”

“Which direction are we going now?”

“We have a heading. Not a direction.”

u He and Leah had planned to go back to that ocean ridge before the meteor struck, if it was safe to travel. They would go there and they would wait for the wall of fire to come and turn them into ash.

But the astrogeologist whom they’d chosen over him was diagnosed with terminal cancer five months before departure. When the phone rang, Leah knew before he said anything. She knew

read WI

{ Book Reviews } he had a place on the ship because she saw the joy in his eyes a millisecond before he masked it.

u

Beneath the Bonfire: Stories

by Nickolas Butler

Boeotia, an ancient republic.

Thomas Dunne Books, 272 pages $23.99

Boerne, a health resort in Texas.

Reviewed by Zachary Carlson

Boeuf River, 200 miles long.

“How far is two hundred miles?”

“Far, if you walk it. It would take you a couple of weeks, at least.”

“I’ve walked around the whole ship.

I’ve walked from one end to the other and back.”

“That’s about two miles. You would have to do that a hundred times.”

“I probably have.”

“Yes, you probably have.”

u The government lied about when it was going to hit. They knew if they told the truth, there would be more chaos than there already had been.

u Borobudur or Du. Boroboedoer \ bōr-ǝ' bǝ-'dů(ǝ)r,\. Ruins of a great Buddhist temple, Central Java prov., Indonesia, ab. 10 m S. of Magelang and 18 m. NW of Jogjakarta; about 1000 years old, built of volcanic lava over a hill, with eight galleries of some 1500 exquisite basrelief carvings and 430 life-size images of Buddha; rediscovered 1835; under government care.

u Leah hadn’t wanted to say good-bye.

She wanted it to be as if he was leaving for work. He had argued and protested with his superiors and had nearly lost his seat by demanding that they let Leah come along. But the first astrogeologist’s wife had Leah’s seat, and they wouldn’t force her off.

Besides, the astrogeologist’s wife was a botanist, and Leah was a poet.

He looked again at all the books they had chosen to preserve and keep precious.

u He spent hours looking at pictures.

The ones he brought, the ones others brought. The billions that were uploaded

Like many Wisconsinites, I’ve spent plenty of summer nights listening to family and friends reminisce and tell stories as our campfire turned to embers. On some nights, the stories move between genres as the tellers take their turns: horror turns to comedy, or a somber memory leads to glad reflections. Long after the fire is out, the best stories—like the smell of wood smoke—often follow you around for days. So it is with Nickolas Butler’s new collection of short stories, Beneath the Bonfire.

As in his fiction debut, Shotgun Lovesongs, this collection is characterized by a strong sense of place. Butler describes the Wisconsin landscape in “Morels” as a “part of the world left intact by the last glaciers that steamrolled the surrounding land, leaving it utterly flat. The Driftless Area, like a postcard of what had been.”

In “Train People Move Slow,” Butler conjures one of the many Wisconsin towns built around a paper mill. “Behind me, the river moved huge and slow, one great broad brown stroke of movement and sound, and beyond it I heard a whistle from the paper plant and the beeping sound of a forklift in reverse.”

Butler’s gift for filling a page with evocative imagery is matched by a narrative voice that pulls you in. Using language that’s direct but rich with meaning, Butler can devastate you with the smallest of moments, as in “The Chainsaw Soirée” when a man’s insecurities are laid bare by a simple gesture. “We held hands and approached the great double doors of the church and just then Bear opened them in tandem and stood before us, his beard long and black, his eyes sparkling blue and the color in his cheeks bright from laboring outdoors. I felt Nancy’s grip on my hand slacken.”

Although some of the stories in Beneath the Bonfire veer toward the conventional—a lonely young woman clings to an abusive lover, old friends grow apart, a man fears the loss of his girlfriend—Butler finds a way to subvert our expectations.

“In Western Counties” feels in many ways like the classic tale of a rogue cop who goes outside the law to combat corruption in the community (in this case western Wisconsin farmland stands in for a gritty, urban setting). But instead of a Clint Eastwood-type, our hero is a retired female police officer struggling with early symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Justice seems to be on Butler’s mind in this collection. In the case of “Sweet Light Crude,” when a retired eco-terrorist forces an oil executive to drink the very crude that was spilled in the gulf, we’re forced to question our own quick assumptions as Butler reminds us that behind the corporate suit is just a person.

These stories aren’t all grit and revenge. Though some deal with the worst of people—abusive dog-fighters or drunken revelers who flee from a tragic automobile accident—others, like “Apples,” are mellow reflections on finding happiness.

In many ways, it’s the distance between these stories that makes them so satisfying to read again and again.

A poet as well as a novelist, Butler succeeds admirably in the short story form.

In Beneath the Bonfire, he’s given his readers a portrait of emotional depth and sprawling Wisconsin lands through stories that traverse the hills and valleys of joy and sorrow.

continue

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

reading

&

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

61

read WI into the central database. Millions of people that no one would ever know.

Birthdays and drunken parties and weddings and other moments of Life on Earth. He looked in private, but they played a constant stream of them in the main passageway, a hall of memories.

The children ran by without noticing the human wallpaper. He wondered what they would make of it all, when they grew up. In the common room they showed movies, they showed football and soccer games, historical newscasts and documentaries. What they had brought along with them was everything.

What they had with them was their only chance to explain what Earth had been.

u They put Leah on the waiting list, moved her to the priority list, but still seven people would have to give up their seats or die before she could get her seat on the ship.

They knew it could happen. It was how he’d gotten his own seat, after all.

u

Three more people died in a car crash on their way to flight training.

That left two.

u Do you hate me? The botanist had said.

It was months into the flight; they had avoided each other’s eyes that long.

He saw her only in the science briefings, this widowed wife of the first astrogeologist.

When he looked at Fiona now he saw how selfish he’d been, how selfish they’d all been. He would never tell her what people could turn into because she shouldn’t know that.

She didn’t have to know that. She only needed to live her life and be happy.

Boscobel \ bäs-kǝ-'bel\. City, Grant co., ' SW corner of Wisconsin.

“That’s where it hit,” Fiona said.

“Yes.” “Why we had to leave.”

“Yes.”

u

I don’t, he told her, but seeing her face caused sparks of something to burn in his brain. If she had stayed behind on a dying earth with her dead husband, then maybe everything that followed could have been avoided.

Don’t you think I see him every time I look at you? she asked him. Don’t you think I see him wasting away every time I look at you?

People did die. One of the engineers, desperate to get his girlfriend on the ship, murdered a passenger. But they quickly found out who had shot him, and the engineer lost his seat. They gave the two empty seats to the second engineer on the list and her husband.

Another passenger had a heart attack and died, and his wife gave up her seat.

They gave the seats to the next two people on the waiting list. There were still five to go.

There were lots of vacancies, in fact, but they were for the children—the ones they hoped would be born. Planned to be born. They wanted to bring lots of embryos in case women had trouble getting pregnant in space. No one had ever tried it so they didn’t know what to expect. But it had to work.

“What was it like, when it came?”

Fiona asked.

“I don’t know exactly. I was on the ship by then.”

“But you saw it. I heard you talking to mom one night.”

“She’s not mom. I told you.”

“But I grew inside of her.”

62

PEOP L E

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

u Boscobel \ bäs-kǝ-'bel\. City, Grant co., ' SW corner of Wisconsin, on Wisconsin river; pop. (1970c) 2510; farm trade center; founding place of the Gideons, society of commercial travelers (1899).

u

&

I D E A S

“She’s your surrogate. That’s all. I explained about eggs. You came from your own mother’s egg. You have a mother. She died on the planet.”

“Yes,” Fiona sighed. “I know.”

He watched her eyes and saw that somewhere between yesterday and today Fiona had changed from a child to something very different from a child. Did anyone ever see it? That exact moment when it happened?

“We were on the opposite side, already in space when it hit,” he told her. “But we saw the glow from the fires.

We kept in contact with the people on the other side, as long as we were in range. And then we lost contact.”

“What did they say?”

He wouldn’t tell her that. He wouldn’t tell her how the people left behind pleaded for the ship to return, to let them send up just one more shuttle.

How the people on the ship pleaded to go back.

“They were afraid,” he told her.

“People were scared and lots of people died.”

She thought about this for a long time, staring at the same page in the geography reference book.

Boscoreale \ bäs-kō-rā-'äl-ē\. Commune, ' Napoli prov., Campania, Italy, at foot of S slope of Vesuvius near Pompeii; pop.

(1968e) 19,655; important discoveries of antiquities have been made in vicinity.

“Why didn’t they build more ships?”

Fiona asked.

u A few months before the flight, he tried getting Leah pregnant. Pregnant women were given a few of the places that were reserved for the children. They saved many places for young girls, because once they reached childbearing age they could carry the frozen embryos.

Parents rioted for a chance to give up their only daughters, for a chance to get them on the flight.

u “Where did they keep this ship?

Where did it come from?”

“This ship? They built it in orbit.”

“So it never touched the earth.”

read WI

{ Book Reviews } “No.” “Like me.”

Tracks on Damp Sand u

Boskoop \'bȯs- kōp\. Commune, South ' Holland prov., Netherlands, 2 m. NW of

by Franco Pagnucci North Star Press of St. Cloud, $12.95, 84 pages

Reviewed by Claire Dulgar

Gouda; pop. (1970e) 11,600; famous for its nurseries of roses and other flowering shrubs.

u There were lots of places on the ship to run around, to explore. It had been built to be child friendly. The library was for adults, but mature children like Fiona could go in. There were play rooms and classrooms, and the greenhouse room where the food was grown was another kind of learning center, where children could build their own salad farms. The livestock areas were often the most interesting, where the goats were milked and the milk taken to the dairy room where they made cheese. The children liked collecting eggs from the chickens and laughed when the rooster crowed and the little chicks were born. They liked watching the waste ejected into space.

u

As someone who appreciates the writings of Henry David Thoreau, I have tried to imagine what it would be like to experience nature as he did in 19th century America, to have even a modestly similar experience as this: “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”

Evocative expression is something we expect of nature poetry, but how is it successfully achieved?

The sixty-two poems of Barnes-based poet Franco Pagnucci’s Tracks on Damp Sand offer a lesson. His fifth collection of poetry seems to channel the spirit of Thoreau, evoking in the reader a sublime feeling of being a part of an organic whole, a melding of the human and the natural that seems almost ordained.

A good teacher doesn’t tell his students what to think, but awakens them to new thoughts and feelings. Tracks on Damp Sand sends us to the amazing classroom of the outdoors to face the nature of nature, to see with the poet’s eyes details so easily missed.

In this selection from “Love” we see how Tracks enables our humbling participation in nature’s expansive domain: So, why shouldn’t I think of you, how you saw that scarlet finch, working between tufts of the spruce, gathering cobwebs into a ball,

Bordø, an island of the Faeroes (q.v.) the sun brightening his scarlet throat,

“Like where the pyramids were?”

“Not pharaohs. Faeroes.” He spelled it for her. “They’re a chain of islands in the north Atlantic Ocean.” He showed her on the ephemeral, rotating globe.

“They look so small,” Fiona said.

“They were.”

“You could get lost in the ocean,” she said. “You could get lost at sea.”

Yes, he thought. It happened all the time.

u He thought about paying someone to kill the couple standing in the way of Leah’s seat on the ship. It was easy to get people to do things in the last days—there would be no prison, no consequences. Everyone had always come to the same end but now they were all coming to it at once, no matter who they were, and there was nothing they could do about it, and it unleashed some kind of collective Fuck You to

and how you called me to the window?

Pagnucci also makes room for intimacy. In one poem “the lake skips,” in another “Dusk undresses in our windows.” In “Patience” we witness winter’s progress: “Today, in one place, the ice heaved under our feet like a great tingling shoulder, shifting in sleep.” In “Sometimes You Push Back the Curtains,” Pagnucci shares a poignant inevitability: Sometimes you push back the curtains and find the red fox standing on a stump.

She looks at you and you know summer has slipped by and the years, Your mother’s age marks are on the back of your hands.

The fox looks mottled in her new gray with black spots.

continue W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

reading &

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

63

read WI social conventions and law. There were things that people did in the final days that they wouldn’t have imagined doing in normal times.

He thought about it. He went so far as to make casual inquiries in an anonymous part of the city.

But there were still consequences for people who had seats on the ship. If only he could be sure no one would trace the murders to him.

u “How long is a hundred years?”

“Long.”

“Will you live another hundred years?”

“No.” “Will I?” “I don’t know.”

“Will I see the new planet?”

“Your children will.”

u The botanist offered to carry the embryo that would become Fiona. He was ready to have a child three years into the flight, when his sorrow and guilt over Leah’s death had subsided enough that he could stand to look into a face that might resemble hers. When he asked the botanist why she wanted to do this, she had said, It’s the closest thing, isn’t it?

u Borstal \'bȯrst-ǝl, 'bōrst-\. Village near Rochester, Kent, SE England; site of Borstal reformatory (founded 1902) which pioneered the segregation of young offenders from mature criminals, and other reforms (Borstal system).

B o s t o n M o u n t a i n s Ridge in Ozark

they’d all been. He would never tell her what people could turn into because she shouldn’t know that. She didn’t have to know that. She only needed to live her life and be happy. Maybe he would tell his grandchildren because by then everything that happened would only be a story, a long-ago memory of a time that never was.

u “How many children will I have?”

“I hope a lot.”

“Will they remember Earth?”

“No. Only what we tell them.”

“We can give them this book. And you can tell them what you remember.”

“That’s all we can do.”

“We don’t have a home right now,” she said.

“That’s right. But we have each other.”

“And we have the ship.”

“Yes.” “It’s taking us home.”

u It turned out he didn’t have to kill anyone. Other people who were further down on the waiting list murdered people who had seats on the ship. More people got killed, more people were expelled from the ship. It happened so fast and so often that it was hard to keep track of who was going and who was dead. Leah had her seat and so did lots of other new people. Their joy was tempered by the mounting deaths, but they shared a quiet gratitude between them.

And then someone killed Leah to open up another seat.

Plateau in NW Arkansas; highest peak

u

over 2800 ft.

“Tell me again, what is a mountain?”

“Something you climb. And it seems easy when you start but the longer you walk, the taller it seems to get.”

Botwood \'bät- wůd\ Town, E Newfound' land, Canada, 160 m. WNW of St. John’s; pop (1971p) 4109; has large seaplane base and 30 m. to the E is large airport, western terminus for transatlantic planes.

Bountiful \'baůnt-i-fǝl\. City, Davis co.

Bourem or Burem \bů-'rem\. Town,

N Utah, 8 mi. N of Salt Lake City; pop.

Mali, W Africa, on Niger river E of

(1970c) 27,956; truck gardens; fruit

Tombouctou.

(esp.) cherry orchards.

u When he looked at Fiona now he saw how selfish he’d been, how selfish

u Who could he hate? He had contemplated doing to some other husband or wife the very thing Leah had suffered,

that he had suffered. The murderer died on the planet, and so had billions of innocent people. Their flesh had burned away from their skeletons, their bones rendered to ash. The clouds that blocked the sun were filled with the dust of the dead.

u “Is anyone left on Earth?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe.”

“But it’s dark and cold,” she said.

“Everything’s dying.”

“Even the rivers?”

“Yes.” “A river is skinny water and an ocean is wide water.”

How could he tell her more and make her understand? How could he make her know what a river really was? He could show her the map, the photographs. But the long grasses that lined the banks, the water bugs, the old fishermen in banged-up duck boats wearing dirty mesh baseball caps waving ancient rods that dripped spidery lines into the muddy water? Fiona had seen grass; they grew it for the goats. But she had never seen tall weeds spiking out of sandy bluffs, she had never felt them scratch her ankles. She had never rolled up her pant legs and waded into shallow streams, trying to scoop minnows into an empty spaghetti sauce jar. She had never tried to see the minnows through the camouflage of sunlight that floated on the tiny ripples made by her feet. She had seen the ocean in the documentaries and had an idea how vast it was, but she would never stand next to one, never know how much she would dwarf, how small she would feel, and incongruously how large she would feel when she danced to the power of the waves.

“That’s right. An ocean is wide and a river is skinny.”

“Why are you on the ship and not there? Why did you get to come?”

He took a long time to answer.

“Just lucky,” he said.

“Am I? Am I lucky?” Z Author's Note: Geographical information cited from Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1977, previous edition copyright 1972.

read WI

{ Book Reviews } New & RECENT Releases

APRIL 2015 Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land

by Sandy Tolan Bloomsbury

The free verse and personal style of Tracks help the reader “know” the story.

And touching yet energetic images emerge, as in the endearing matrimonial bungling in “You Heard,” where a male eagle struggles with a big stick in a great wind trying to impress the female with his building skills: He rose above the white pine’s

They Are All My Family: A Daring Rescue in the Chaos of Saigon’s Fall

by John P. Riordan PublicAffairs

peak and her whistles

Listen & Other Stories

by Liam Callanan Four Way Books

left of center, next to the trunk.

Reliquary of Debt: Poems

by Wendy Vardaman Cowfeather Press The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the Northwoods

by Ron Legero and Avi Lank Wisconsin Historical Society Press

MAY 2015 Long Black Curl (Book III of the Tufa Novels)

By Alex Bledsoe TOR Books

JUNE 2015 Impersonations: Poems

by Mark Zimmerman Pebblebrook Press A Winsome Murder

by James DeVita University of Wisconsin Press Death at Gills Rock: A Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery

by Patricia Skalka University of Wisconsin Press The Cherry Harvest

by Lucy Sannaby William Morrow

July 2015 The Coincidence of the Coconut Cake

by Amy E. Reichert Gallery Books Did we miss something? E-mail the editor at jsmith@wisconsinacademy.org with new and recent titles by Wisconsin authors to read and review.

and loosened his claws, letting the long stick drop, It settled well but dislodged a couple sticks below it, and they tumbled through the pine’s branches, knocking and echoing, like a screwdriver down a basement stairs. When he dropped in next to her on the branch, she shifted a little, then settled back against his side.

Creating a sense of place is a strength of this collection, and it is Pagnucci’s artistry that brings immediacy to nature’s stage: roads, woods, hills, trees, bays, lakes with “milky ice-fringes along shore,” and skies topped with “an orange horizon.”

The human participants in these poems recognize themselves as part of the landscape. They own nothing, take nothing more than the creatures around them.

For Pagnucci, nature has the power to stop us in our tracks like that sparrow on the shoulder, reveal what is important, and connect us to something larger.

Like Thoreau, Pagnucci values simplicity—a hallmark of effective poetry. Simple experience guides Pagnucci’s syllabus, and his instructions are clear: look-see, hear-listen, never intrude, and always, always keep learning.

Some say bald eagles lay eggs in early March, and we’d seen them, now and then, hauling sticks to the old nest, but I was out and looked up because I heard that whistle, He was on her, and ever since I’ve been mulling the fact that she must have whistled.

“Early March—That Whistle”

There is a richness outside our doors that begs our notice. Franco Pagnucci knows that Thoreau’s sparrow holds indescribable power; with Tracks on Damp Sand he reminds us that we too can be “distinguished by that circumstance,” as in “All That Is Left”: All goes silent though I put these words around you And nature is unmoved, even if I love what green is left. Z

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

65

read WI

poetry contest

winners

ABOUT THE POET

Winner of the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Prize in Poetry:

The poems of Lisa Vihos have appeared in Big Muddy, Forge, Main Street Rag, Mom Egg, Seems, Verse Wisconsin, and Wisconsin People & Ideas, among others. She has two Pushcart Prize nominations and two chapbooks: A Brief History of Mail (Pebblebrook Press, 2011) and The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012). She is the poetry and arts editor for Stoneboat and an occasional guest blogger for The Best American Poetry.

Lesson at the Check Point

Please be advised that snow globes

are not allowed through the security check point.

—LaGuardia Airport sign

Is this because of the snow? Or because of the little houses that nestle inside the snow?

I imagine it is because of the liquid and the potential to inject an explosive through the dome of the glass. Evil is inserted every day into our minds, under our skin, through the iCloud, through layers of data that shred the ozone (an ozone held together by scotch tape, chicken wire

JUDGE’S NOTES

and American Idol.) One day, someone picks us up, shakes us, and all hell breaks loose. Worlds collide.

By Kara Candito: In the spirit of Wi sla wa Szymb orska, this speaker meditates upon a contextualized occasion of power.

Formally and philosophically rigorous, “Lesson at the Check Point” forges a difficult, necessary dialogue between power, fear, and everyday experience.

The very equilibrium we once believed in, cast aside by a wave of the hand. While some God, somewhere, waits at a check point, watching for the terrorist in each of us, wary of small things, like six ounce jars of olive spread, beard trimming scissors, and yes, snow globes. These things tucked in between the socks and underwear, waiting to destroy us.

—Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan

66

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

us n o B oem P

The Things We Did Not Bring I don’t think I ever brought my sotto to your voce, my custom to your fit, my ultra to your marine.

I know you did not bring your vice to my versa, your soft shell to my crab, your burnt to my umber.

We’re both to blame for the meager flame of our knock-down love, with its instruction sheet in six languages, none of which we both spoke. We built a three-legged table incapable of holding dinner or a place to play chess. Us, the rogue king and queen.

I could have brought my check to your mate. And you could have brought your desert to my island.

Perhaps if we had brought sienna, we could have made a warmer picture.

—Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

67

read WI

ABOUT THE POET

Second-Place Prize in Poetry:

As a child, Sean Avery was a military brat who thought he was a Power Ranger and kicked his grandma (but that’s a story for another time). Today, Avery is a rapper, poet, First Wave Scholar (look it up), and senior studying English Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, by way of the Sun (b.k.a the suburbs of Avondale, Arizona). His work embraces both his imagination and his journey towards defining his own Black Masculinity.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Kara Candito: Linguistic virtuosity, experimental vision and subject matter coalesce in “Prayer (Song) for Magic.”

Its multiple revisions and omissions enact the violence of the systems of power to which the speaker’s prayer responds.

Prayer (Song) for Magic [Introduction] 17-year-old Trayvon Martin fatally shot by 28-year-old George Zimmerman 17-year-old Jordan Davis fatally shot by 45-year-old Michael Dunn 18-year-old Michael Brown fatally shot by 28-year-old police officer Darren Wilson 12-year-old Tamir Rice fatally shot by 26-year-old police officer Timothy Loehmann [Verse] white men with magnums make black children phantoms, I’m singing anthems praying to freeze handguns, I don’t have powers but I produce poems that ask if my children can make all the cannons unmade [Chorus] (x4) oh heavenly father give us all your magic give us every spell you can lend we have your good book now we need your spell book the bible can’t battle a bullet [Conclusion] “ A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. . Today they've taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms and traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs , and they’re still doing the same thing.”

—Malcolm X — Sean Avery, Madison

68

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

us Boonem P

In My Dreams

I can have anything

& everything I ever wanted.

—Kid Cudi

I wanna be like the Silver Surfer, coasting on white-hot solar winds at the expanding universe’s edge.

In my dreams I take that form: I project past planets our Sun has claimed, where stars blossom & fade like fresh bruises.

The skin of this world names me slave’s great-grandson, touring minstrel, & factory worker.

What I would give for my Mom’s hands rubbing oil on my dry scalp, Take care of yourself Sean.

But how do I love this body staked & named everything except what I name myself?

My day is another day.

Classmates either ignore me or study me, like lecture notes.

Nightfalls & I become an aura stitching my own name across the black canvas of the night.

— Sean Avery, Madison

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

69

read WI

ABOUT THE POET

Third-Place Prize in Poetry:

Kathleen Dale was born in Kansas, though she has lived on the shore of Lake Michigan for many years. A serious amateur pianist, Dale has always seen an intimate connection between music and poetry. Her blog at kathleenanndale.squarespace.com chronicles the process of creating both poetry and musical performance.

A Pushcart nominee, Dale is also the recipient of several prizes and best-inissue awards for her poems. Proceeds from the sale of her most recent book, The Beautiful Unnamed (Zarigueya Press, 2015), benefit Jazale’s Art Studio, which promotes the arts and education for the youth of Milwaukee.

The Self-organizing Universal Nail Salon As the young, slight, male manicurist deftly massages my hand, we turn our heads in opposite directions as if such pleasure between strangers were unseemly in light of everyday suffering. But who am I to believe that broken things might not even now be making their way toward new, if temporary, wholes, the ragged edges of extremities healed, soothed, polished by the practiced touch of water on pitted rock, by the ecstatic surrender of stone to the repeated plunging of wave?

—Kathleen Dale, Milwaukee

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Kara Candito: I admire this poem’s attention to the complex fleetingness of consumerist pleasure. Like Lynda Hull, this poet manages to leap seamlessly from present tense narration to lyric transformation.

Thanks to our 2015 Contest Sponsors 70

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

us Boonem Palimpsest: P

Painting her again

I keep scraping the canvas

And painting him over again

But he keeps slipping away

—Edward Hirsch

Putting her fragments Together in yet Another way Turning her differently-aged Profiles this direction and that So as to see new things In different lights Even though the outcome Is always the same Putting her repeated death Against once-future events Casting it into differing perspectives The cherished daughters Arriving years after The fact of loss Connecting her to a whole World of living relations Memories Shaded with deepening insight Never-before-seen colors added To my basic box of crayons Foreshortening my grief Triangulating its source As I scribble wax over oil Still trying to get A fix On sorrow

2015 Contest Honorable mention POEMS AND STORIES Congratulations to our ten honorable mention poets for their outstanding works of poetry: • "Hooked,"

by Sharon Foley — Whitefish Bay • "Annunciation,"

by Lisa Vihos — Sheboygan • "Neighbors,"

by Jeri McCormick — Madison • "Sand County,"

by Jessi Peterson — Eau Claire • "What Remains,"

by John Pidgeon — Green Bay • "Let's Intuit Something,"

by Jess Williard — Madison • "Some People,"

by Molly Murphy – Madison • "A Few Miles Outside Warroad, Several Weeks Before the Fall,"

by Christine Holm — Oconomowoc • "We Were Wrong, But Were Given Five Ruins to Consider for Winter,"

by Christine Holm — Oconomowoc • "Homeless in August,"

by Kathleen Dale — Milwaukee Congratulations to our six honorable mention authors for their outstanding stories: • "The Confession of Cassius Troy,"

by Shaun Melarvie — Sturgeon Bay • "His First Revolution,"

by William Lawlor — Stevens Point • "Enough,"

by Melaney Poli — Waukesha • "Oh You Kids,"

by Jon Hakes — Appleton • "Anna's Quilt,"

by Robert Holzman — Wautoma • "The Singing,"

by Kay N. Sanders — Oshkosh Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2015 contests. For more contest information, visit wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

—Kathleen Dale, Milwaukee

W i s c o n s i n

PEOP L E

&

I D E A S

s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 5

71

Do you want to be better informed about—and more engaged in shaping—

Do you believe a stronger, more diverse creative

Wisconsin thought and culture?

community

enhances the quality of life in our state?

Do you value

Do you want to

preserve and protect Wisconsin’s natural resources?

Do you think we can address

the issues of our times

discovery, learning, and critical thinking?

through civil discussion?

Wiissccoon nssiin n Soo ddoo W S M y M e y e mbbeerrss!! m m m e e d d a a c c A A Since 1870, the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy has brought people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on important issues. We’re a membership organization open to any and every one interested in fostering a more creative and resilient Wisconsin.

BECOME A MEMBER TODAY! FOR ONLY

You can begin your Wisconsin Academy membership and join a community of people creating a better Wisconsin.

YOU’RE INVITED

YEP!

Issues of our awardwinning magazine of Wisconsin thought and culture, Wisconsin People & Ideas, arrive at your door as part of your annual membership in the Wisconsin Academy.

Subscription to our monthly electronic newsletter and invitations to lectures, art exhibitions, and discussion forums that explore the intersection of the sciences, arts and letters.

Be the first to know about opportunities to network with Wisconsin Academy Fellows and other members from across the state.

discuss

Beginning your Wisconsin Academy membership is easy. Anyone can join. Visit

wisconsinacademy.org/join

inspire illuminate create

Be informed.

Be inspired. wpr.org Wisconsin and the World.

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

1922 university avenue | madison WI 53726 Price

$5

C o m i n g

t h i s

F a l l

WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Managing Water Like Nature: An Evening with Kevin Shafer

Visual Art and the Wisconsin Idea: 75 years Encouraging Wisconsin Artists

Tuesday, September 7:00–8:00 pm Greenfield Public Library

Thursday, September 24, 7:00–8:30 pm Wisconsin Studio, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison

Where should our water to come from and where should it go? Join us for an evening with Kevin Shafer, executive director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), who is leading a national endeavor to better manage water using a natural approach. Instead of more pipes and treatment plants, Shafer and his colleagues manage water where it falls in the effort to improve performance from the built environment as well buffer urban residents from floods and other phenomena related to climate change. Free with advance online registration, this Academy Talk is brought to you in partnership with Greenfield Library.

Join us for the rare opportunity to explore the history and future of rural arts in Wisconsin with two of its greatest leaders: Maryo Gard Ewell, an arts administrator and daughter of arts advocate Robert E. Gard, and artist and Wisconsin Rural Art Program director Helen Klebesadel tell the story of how the Wisconsin Idea fostered the development of Wisconsin’s rural artists past and present. Free with advance online registration, this Academy Talk is brought to you in partnership with the Wisconsin Rural Arts Program.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

LOGJAM On view September 11–October 6 Related Events: • Opening reception with gallery talk on Sunday, September 13, from 1–4:00 pm • Gallery tour and presentation by folklorist Jim Leary on the Historic Sounds from Northwoods Lumber Camps on Tuesday, September 15, from 6–8:00 pm

Mark Iwinski, Ghost Spruce, 200 years old (detail); 2014.

Woodblock on handmade indigo Gampi paper, 73” H x 73” W.

LOGJAM features the work of Brenda Baker, Kevin Giese, and Mark Iwinski, three artists whose sculpture and prints inspire reflection on environmental restoration and the health of our forests. Through photographs, artifacts, and text, the exhibition will also consider the legacy of the Wisconsin clearcut, the rise of industrial forestry, and the development of more sustainable forest products. This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details