Looking Back to Look Ahead: The Wisconsin Idea in the Arts

Sauk Prairie Area Historical Society

BY MARYO GARD EWELL

On October 3, 1914, over 4,000 people gathered in rural Sauk City to attend the opening of a play. Written, organized, and directed by Ethel Rockwell, the University of Wisconsin Extension’s director of community drama, A Social Center Pageant promised attendees a day-long exploration of “a new movement in democracy” and a celebration of the city’s decision to adopt the local school as its social and cultural center.

A crowd gathers around Sauk City High School as participants in Ethel Rockwell’s A Social Center Pageant move the town ballot box from City Hall to the high school in a gesture that represents the convergence of citizenship and education.

Pageants featuring large numbers of costumed actors portraying historic moments, acting out morality tales, or even serving as a tool in city planning, were common at the time. Held outdoors, A Social Center Pageant included scores of local actors dedicated to the lofty principles articulated in the program. Foremost among them was the notion that government should no longer be “merely the selection of agents for repression, but … the all-inclusive and living fellowship of citizens in a creative process of self-education.”

A rapt audience followed the cast across town for scenes that took place in several different locations, culminating in a final act in which participants removed the community’s ballot box from the town hall and led a triumphant procession to the school house where it was installed. The interpretation of this symbolic gesture, according to a Sauk City resident who was there, was that the school would become the true “seat of continual learning and open inquiry.”

Then, as now, the country was roiling with cultural and political changes. W.E.B. DuBois was writing articles and books that probed the ways in which Black citizens were treated unfairly by American systems and structures. The Settlement House movement was addressing ways that immigrants could be better assimilated into American culture. Congress had created the Cooperative Extension Service to work with state universities to improve the quality of rural life and economics. Meanwhile, urban officials were engaged in conversations about education reform, the condition of prisons, fair labor practices, and the roots of poverty. At the same time, large-scale industrial and technological advances, such as the automobile and electricity, began to widen the gap between “haves” and “have nots” and between urban and rural life. People were discussing what “democracy” meant in this new reality, and for the people gathered in Sauk City that day the question of the ballot box was not a trivial one.

A reporter from Harper’s Weekly, who traveled all the way from New York to cover the play, noted that its theme dealt with “the new theory that the business of citizenship and the business of education constitute one process.” That this event occurred in a tiny Wisconsin town was “as richly significant as the rifle shot at Concord or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

The play was truly an example of creativity in the service of big ideas. A Social Center Pageant also ushered in an era in which a set of beliefs shared by Governor Robert M. LaFollette and University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise would forever alter the artistic and cultural life of our state. These beliefs, collectively known as “the Wisconsin Idea,” were founded in a deep humanism and preached a gospel of the university as a body in service to the entire state. According to the Wisconsin Idea, innovation in sciences, arts, and letters was to be made available for use by all, and residents were encouraged to cultivate their special interests and latent artistic talents in pursuit of building better lives, and stronger communities. The ultimate purpose of all of this activity was the establishment of a high-functioning democracy that viewed “the state as an instrument for the well-being of all people” rather than just the privileged few.

A very big idea, indeed. Ethel Rockwell’s pageant was a foundational moment within a larger movement to apply the central tenets of the Wisconsin Idea to the arts. Her Bureau of Dramatic Activities, within UW Extension, freely loaned scripts to anyone in Wisconsin wanting to present a show, and Rockwell frequently made herself available to advise fledgling theatrical endeavors. Her colleague Thomas Dickinson, a professor in the University of Wisconsin English Department, was at the same time encouraging the writing and production of locally themed plays. Dickinson considered theater to be “the workshop of democracy” and drew on the spirit of LaFollette-style Progressivism to establish the Wisconsin Dramatic Society to ensure the proliferation of locally produced theater throughout the state. Zona Gale, a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright from Portage, was among the many playwrights whom Dickinson nurtured through his work.

But it wasn’t just theater. The influence of the Wisconsin Idea in the arts could be felt—and heard—by the thousands of rural residents who participated in singing societies inspired by Professor Edgar “Pop” Gordon. Gordon had begun his career at Hull House in Chicago and was deeply influenced by founder Jane Addams’ belief that arts are “a potent agent for making the universal appeal, and inducing men to forget their differences.” Like Addams, Gordon found that singing, in particular, could help build strong communities. He put this theory to practice in places like De Pere, where he created an ecumenical choral society to help bridge social distinctions. After years of criss-crossing Wisconsin by train to coordinate the creation of choral groups, Gordon took his ideas to the producers of the newly established WHA radio. Developed to help deliver ideas and learning to the rural communities of the state, WHA eventually became home to Gordon’s immensely popular “Journeys in Musicland” and “Let’s Sing!” broadcasts, which were aimed largely at schoolchildren and heard in hundreds of classrooms from 1931 to 1955.

Many in Wisconsin were beginning to see how the arts could improve the cultural fabric of their state, but few understood the role the arts and creativity could play in Wisconsin’s economic development. In an article titled “What the University Can Do for the Business Man,” in the Bulletin of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Milwaukee (May 1908), Charles Van Hise wrote, “I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, … and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”

The tools the university had at its disposal— correspondence courses, farm short courses, visiting professors, WHA Radio—if used correctly could extend education opportunities to all. These tools were made even more effective through collaboration with agents of the federal Cooperative Extension program, who were broadly charged with the improvement of rural life. In addition to sharing best practices around agriculture, home economics, and other important subjects, Cooperative Extension agents often encouraged “home talent” plays at county fairs, the first being in Vernon County in 1925.

By 1932, 40 of Wisconsin’s then 71 counties (Menominee County was added in 1959) had held at least one drama event, leading to a statewide drama festival in Madison, hosted by Cooperative Exten-

sion and the College of Agriculture, with judges from the Speech Department. Audiences there might have seen a production of the comedy Goose Money, by Marion Lucy Felton, the script for which was published by University Extension in 1928. The play is especially notable in that it includes a preface on the importance of rural arts—“there is poetry as well as production on a farm”—by then University of Wisconsin President Glenn Frank. Moreover, it likely that this play was chosen for publication because Mrs. Felton, describing herself as “just an ordinary farm woman,” had created an authentic portrayal of farm life that could “tempt other farm men and women to try their hand at developing real rural folk drama.”

In a sweeping study titled The Arts Workshop of Rural America (1938), sociologist Marjorie Patten described the impact of the work of Cooperative Extension agents in the arts:

The fact that plays are produced in addition to discussions of problems such as dairy marketing, the financing of rural education, … taxation, and so forth, and that these interests are supplemented by music festivals and folk-dancing events, have proved that farmers are thinking of the drama not as an end in itself but as a normal part of a program that meets the needs of whole communities.

The Milwaukee Journal at the time noted the Patten study and summarized the importance of its findings, stating in an editorial, “When rural communities reveal such a hunger for plays, it means something—something big.”

But it wasn’t just a hunger for plays that was growing across the state. A new movement to meet the demand for more opportunity in the visual arts was also underway.

Inspired by the Danish Folk School movement, in which cultural learning was integral to learning the skills of farming, UW College of Agriculture Dean Chris Christensen asked John Barton of the Rural Sociology Department to help develop a visual arts program for rural communities. In 1936, the two men struck upon the idea of inviting landscape painter John Steuart Curry to the University of Wisconsin for a rural artist residency, the first of its kind in the United States.

Under the banner of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program, Curry traveled across the state to inspire Wisconsin farmers and their family members to paint, carve, sculpt—to find the “culture in agriculture.” On his visits, Curry would encourage the formation of local artist clubs, the first being the Rural Rembrandts of Wautoma. Curry’s colleague James Schwalbach complemented this outreach work in the visual arts through his “Let’s Draw!” radio program, which ran on WHA and later Wisconsin Public Radio from 1936 to 1970. Because many rural schools had only one room and few faculty with any inkling about art, for over thirty years Schwalbach became the de facto art teacher for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin students.

Because of the boom in painting, drawing, and sculpture during the years immediately following World War II, the university hired Robert E. Gard in 1945 to do for theater and writing what Curry

Robert Gard visits with farmers on May 9, 1955. Gard traveled across the state (note the Wisconsin Idea Theater logo painted on the side of his truck) to promote and cultivate the theatrical arts in rural communities. Gard was a well-known figure in Wisconsin through his travels as well as his WHA-Radio program, and later WHA-TV program, “Wisconsin Is My Doorstep.”

and Schwalbach were doing for the visual arts. Established that same year, Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater nurtured scores of new community theater groups and encouraged local writers to pen their own shows. A few years later, Gard brought together the first meeting of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association to decide how “to best further the native literature and lore of Wisconsin.”

Like Ethel Rockwell and John Steuart Curry, Gard and his staff offered nearly unlimited advice and support to grassroots theater and writing groups (indeed Gard’s family often complained that he was seldom home). In addition, Gard and his colleague David Peterson traveled across the state with a theater troupe to stage plays as well as Peterson’s original musicals about Wisconsin history, stories, and issues. These shows were performed everywhere, from community centers and school gyms to county fairs and state parks.

A 1949 article in the New York Times neatly articulated the relationship between the Wisconsin Idea and the out-pouring of drama in rural Wisconsin:

It is a theatre whose walls are the boundaries of the State of Wisconsin, whose stage is as large as all the stages in the state put together, whose audience numbers in the millions and whose participants are the thousands of actors, directors, technicians, and playwrights within the boundaries of the state.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, key members of UW Extension’s faculty continued to champion the arts and support grassroots endeavors, including Karen Cowan, a former cheerleader with the Green Bay Packers who traveled the state offering dance and choreography workshops. County Extension agents were central in the creation of a crafts guild to help guide marketing of home products such as placemats and glassware made by rural artists.

Established in 1945, Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater nurtured scores of new community theater groups and encouraged local writers to pen their own shows. A few years later, Gard brought together the first meeting of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association to decide how “to best further the native literature and lore of Wisconsin.”

It was during this time that Wisconsin’s best-known historian, former County Extension agent Jerry Apps, got his start as a writer with a weekly column titled “Outdoor Notebook” for the Waushara Argus. Clutching a fistful of his collected columns, Apps visited Robert Gard’s office in Madison to see if Gard could help turn them into a book. With Gard’s encouragement and under his publishing imprimatur, Apps created The Land Still Lives in 1970, thereby launching one of the greatest literary careers in Wisconsin history. (In 2019, the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published a 50th anniversary edition of the book.)

By 1965, Gard had set his sights on cultivating creativity at the community level in new ways. As director of the Office of Community Arts Development in the UW–Madison College of Agriculture, he began working with communities to establish arts councils to better serve local needs. He and his colleagues distributed over 20,000 copies of their seminal book, The Arts in the Small Community: A National Plan, which sought to re-establish the economic and cultural vitality of America’s faltering towns and rural areas through the incorporation of and participation in the arts. “In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone. They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theater,” wrote Gard in the introduction to the book. “As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and in the places where the people live. The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves.”

The reverberations of the Gard plan and the indefatigable contributions of those others who for more than a hundred years have worked to apply the Wisconsin Idea to the arts are still felt today. The Wisconsin Regional Writers Association continues today as the Wisconsin Writers Association to encourage, educate, support, and promote Wisconsin writers. John Steuart Curry’s art program is still going strong, too. Today’s Wisconsin Regional Art Program (WRAP), which is managed through the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Continuing Studies, holds twenty regional workshops and exhibitions statewide every year. The Association of Wisconsin Artists, a nonprofit group of more than five hundred artists—including that first group, the Rural Rembrandts—supports WRAP’s work in multiple ways and also sponsors a mentorship program for teens and an annual exhibit event for the elementary-age children.

The early work of the Wisconsin Idea Theater is reflected in today’s Northern Sky Theater, which got its start through an incredibly successful David Peterson production of Song of the Inland Seas at Peninsula State Park. According to Northern Sky’s artistic advisor Doc Heide, the endeavor “seemed to grow from the soil of the Wisconsin woodlands.” A former student of Peterson, Heide remarks that the Northern Sky is “a true theatre of the folk, carrying forth songs and themes that had found their way here in the canoes of French voyageurs or the holds of iron ore ships. To offer these gems under a swirl of stars with the smell of campfires warming your soul—priced so that anyone who hankered to could come—was the [Wisconsin Idea Theatre] vision indeed.”

Lois Ireland, Morning Glory, 1948. Oil on canvas, 30⅝ x 35¼ inches. Collection of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Born in Waunakee in 1928, Lois Ireland is known for her scenes of 1940s and 1950s rural Wisconsin. John Steuart Curry encouraged the young Ireland to study art and brought her into the newly formed Wisconsin Regional Art Program. During this time, she produced her most important regionalist work, contributing along with artists Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood to the American Pastoral tradition.

Watching a night performance under a canopy of stars at Northern Sky Theatre in Door County is a one-of-a-kind experience. The theater has its roots in the Peninsula State Part-based Heritage Ensemble, founded in the early 1970s by Wisconsin Idea Theatre stalwart David Peterson.

The impact of Gard’s report, The Arts in the Small Community, can be seen today in direct and indirect ways. Melinda Childs, Community Cultural Development Director at ArtStart in Rhinelander, says that “the spirit of [the former Rhinelander] School of the Arts has long been infused” in ArtStart programs as well as in the Northern National Art Competition and Northern Arts Council support of cultural activity throughout the region. Childs notes that “more recently new generations have embraced that same spirit and infused it into Project North,” a music, art, and environmental sustainability festival.

On her travels across the state, Executive Director of Arts Wisconsin Ann Katz finds herself reminding people that “Wisconsin is an especially creative place with a long history of encouraging the arts from the grassroots on up.” While the University of Wisconsin was indeed important to the movement to make arts a centerpiece of rural communities, she notes that statewide arts groups such as the Wisconsin Arts Board, municipal governments, and countless local creative endeavors have been and continue to be central to creative expression in our state.

Once you see this creative expression, you realize it is everywhere. It’s in the exhibition of works by six contemporary Black female artists from Milwaukee currently on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. It’s in the powerful murals painted in downtown Madison and Milwaukee in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Maybe you’ve noticed it in industrial-themed murals on factory walls in Beloit or in the Art D’Tour installations that dot the green hills of Sauk County or in the songs of Maa Vue of Wausau, who draws on her Hmong roots to create contemporary pop music.

For some it is easier to grasp the impact of the arts on our communities when it is represented in dollars and cents. According

to research released in March 2020 by the U.S. Department of Commerce and National Endowment for the Arts, Wisconsin’s creative sector in 2017 provided a $10.1 billion economic benefit— 3.1% percent of the state’s gross domestic product—and employed over 96,651 people. “That’s more jobs than the state’s beer, biotech, and papermaking industries” combined, notes Arts Wisconsin’s Katz.

Wisconsin is, indeed, a state of creativity, born of a vision crafted more than a century ago and cultivated through a partnership between our citizens, communities, and university and extension systems.

In 1997, at end of her ten-year term as the dean and director of University Cooperative Extension, Ayse Somersan published a series of case studies on the businesses, nonprofits, cultural organizations, and other groups and associations in Wisconsin that have benefitted greatly from UW faculty support.

In Distinguished Service: University of Wisconsin Faculty and Staff Helping to Build Organizations in the State, Somersan observes, “There were [those] who spent a lifetime helping Wisconsin people lead creative and satisfying lives through involvement in the arts. They were University of Wisconsin professors with vision and energy. They partnered with community leaders and artists around the state and institutionalized the idea that the arts are for everyone. This was the University at its best. It was a shining example of the Wisconsin Idea.”

Maryo Gard Ewell is both literally and figuratively a child of the Wisconsin Idea. Her father, Robert E. Gard, who created the Wisconsin Idea Theater, inspired her work in community arts development. She has worked for local arts councils in Connecticut, and for the state arts agency in both Illinois and Colorado, winding up her forty-year career as the designer of Colorado’s Creative Districts program. She is currently the Director of Community Impact for the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley, Colorado, where she lives.

LEARN MORE

Two new resources explore the history of the Wisconsin Idea in the arts. The first is the Robert E. Gard Oral History Collection, a project of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives and the Gard Foundation. Organized by Professor Emeritus of Theater Harv Thompson, the collection includes eighteen interviews with influential artists and educators who worked for UW Extension; it can be found at wisconsinacademy.org/GardOral Histories. The second is a collection of essays edited by UW–Madison sociology professor Chad Alan Goldberg, titled

Education for Democracy: Renewing the

Wisconsin Idea. Published in fall 2020 by the University of Wisconsin Press, Education for Democracy includes an extensive chapter on the arts and argues for a restoration of the value of state universities and humanities education as a public good.

Jon Elliott/MKE Drones

NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS

BY CATIE DEMETS

Imagine a city canopied by green, a community bursting at the seams with plant life. In this place, residents and business owners swap their lawns for perennial plantings and an army of city workers manages the lush natural areas that reach across every neighborhood—regardless of socioeconomic class. Here, a once-empty lot is transformed into a community garden; there, an abandoned warehouse has been removed and turned into a forested park. Formerly sunbaked streets become tree-shaded boulevards, encouraging people to walk or bike to local businesses. Older buildings are retrofitted with rooftop gardens, and new constructions are built to maximize tree cover and minimize open pavement.

This 24-acre stretch of land along the Menomonee River in Milwaukee used to be an abandoned rail yard. In 2013 a group of state and local partners completed its transformation into an urban green space. Today, Three Bridges Park is home to an urban ecology center and bike paths, and hosts over 50,000 visitors every year.

Sounds like a garden-lover’s dream, right?

While it’s true that urban greening on this level would be beautiful, in this idealized city it is happening for another reason: to fight climate change. Urban greening is one among many examples of activities known as natural climate solutions that communities—both urban and rural—around the globe are adopting. While natural climate solutions sounds like a hip new term, it’s really just a catch-all name for the many land conservation, restoration, and management practices that work to capture and store carbon found in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

At a time when our world needs swift, effective action to address climate change, natural climate solutions are pragmatic options for sequestering greenhouse gases. According to a recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, natural climate solutions could provide up to 37% of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperature rise under 2°C.

Part of what makes them so effective is that the infrastructure to increase the scale and scope of many natural climate solutions already exists. Here in Wisconsin, a committed group of researchers, businesses, municipalities, and citizens is already hard at work developing natural climate solutions for our cities, agricultural lands, and forests.

The idea of urban forestry is not new to Wisconsin. Throughout the nineteenth century, Madison and Milwaukee led efforts to plant trees and establish public natural areas. The leaders of these efforts viewed urban forests as important mainly for their aesthetic value and as a place for the public to enjoy nature. While these values remain at the core of many urban forestry efforts, city planners, researchers, and urban residents today recognize a much broader suite of benefits that includes carbon sequestration. Because they do an efficient job of removing carbon from CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and sequestering it in their roots, trunks, and branches, trees are primary tools for natural climate solutions.

Today, communities across Wisconsin are heavily investing in tree planting projects with climate in mind. Abe Lenoch, Community Project Coordinator at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, is currently working with four cities—Ashland, Bayside, Oshkosh,

Because they do an efficient job of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in their roots, trunks, and branches, trees are primary tools for natural climate solutions.

and Sheboygan—to expand their urban forest canopies through a collaborative planting initiative. These cities are all Green Tier Legacy Communities, which means that they are working with state agencies and nonprofit organizations to develop and implement long-term community sustainability plans.

According to Lenoch, these cities planted their trees to address both the long-term threat of climate change and a more nearterm one: flooding. Trees can efficiently mitigate flooding. Lenoch explains, “Leaves intercept rain on its way to the ground, which … reduces the infiltration rate of rain into the groundwater,” giving the ground more time to absorb the water. Trees also reduce “the overall amount of runoff, because leaves absorb water molecules from their surfaces and water vapor from the air.” The four Green Tier Legacy Communities selected climate-resilient tree varieties and strategically planted them in flood-prone areas. Within just a year of planting trees, these communities are already seeing improvements in flood control and water quality in their watersheds.

An expanded tree canopy also helps reduce the urban “heat island” effect, decreasing energy demand for cooling and thereby lowering carbon emissions from power plants. Emphasizing the myriad benefits of urban forestry, Lenoch explains that “you can use manmade structures and surfaces to get the same cooling effects of trees. But they don’t provide wildlife habitat like trees do. They don’t reduce traffic speeds like trees do. They don’t provide the other public health benefits that trees provide, like improved mental and physical health. That’s the best part of trees as a climate solution.”

While urban forestry can be seen as a silver bullet, Lenoch warns that “you can’t just plant any tree anywhere and leave it and expect it to have all these co-benefits. You have to plan what you plant and where you plant it. You have to have a maintenance plan for the life of the tree. You have to have a replacement plan in case the tree dies. You have to work with community members and neighborhood residents. Urban forestry projects are not just about planting more trees. There’s more that goes into it over the long term.”

While all these elements add up to long-term investment, the many benefits that trees provide—from carbon sequestration to reduced energy demands to improved water quality to elevated public health—make the effort worthwhile. As Lenoch says, “Trees are a vital tool for the health of all Wisconsin communities.”

Agriculture is one of Wisconsin’s leading industries, as the state is home to over 13 million acres of farmland. According to Fred Clark, Executive Director of Wisconsin’s Green Fire, “whether farms serve as a net carbon source or a net carbon sink depends largely on cropping methods, farm operations, and nutrient inputs.” Clark says that Wisconsin’s farm acreage is mainly managed through practices that emit, rather than store, carbon. This means we are missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage natural climate solutions in the fight against climate change.

As a conglomeration of minerals, living microbes, and plant matter, soil has the inherent capacity to store carbon. Different agricultural management systems can damage or enhance this capacity. Practices common among large-scale conventional operations, such as intensive tillage and the application of broad-spectrum agrochemicals, can damage the natural carbon storage capacity of soil. These operations often emit significant greenhouse gases through

use of fossil fuel-burning equipment and other energy-intensive practices. By and large, these kinds of operations are net carbon sources.

By contrast, net carbon sinks are agricultural operations that minimize soil disturbance through targeted weeding, rather than wholesale tillage, and use of nutrient-fixing crops to keep soil covered in order to enhance the natural capacity of soil to maintain fertility and store carbon.

Imagine if we could leverage more of Wisconsin’s vast agricultural acreage into a giant carbon sink. Diane Mayerfeld, Senior Outreach Specialist at UW–Madison’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, says that “there are many ways to improve the climate footprint of agriculture.”

One especially promising new practice for climate-focused farming is perennial agriculture. Mayerfeld notes that, for the most part, “all of our major staple grain crops, including corn, wheat, barley, and rye … grow for half of the year. During the other half of the year, the soil is bare.” On the whole, this type of agricultural system—spring planting, fall harvest—tends to emit carbon and leave soil vulnerable to carbon loss through erosion and respiration (free interaction of organic material with the air) during the intervening months.

Across the Midwest, farmers and researchers are working together to breed a robust spectrum of climate-resilient, perennial grain crops that could live through a whole year or more and be harvested multiple times before they die. These range from familiar crops such as grasses, wheat, sorghum, and various legumes to new crops like Kernza, a relative of annual wheat. According to Mayerfeld, perennial crops such as these can sequester carbon “as soon as it warms up, instead of just for a few months of the year. At the same time, they keep the soil covered, so it’s less prone to carbon loss.” While many of these varieties need to be further refined before they are ready for broad-scale application, Mayerfeld says they show “great promise for setting a more sustainable course for our global agricultural systems.”

Beyond their potential for capturing carbon, diversified agricultural systems can also provide a variety of economic opportunities. Mayerfeld tells the story of a Wisconsin farmer who returned to his parents’ conventional dairy farm and is in the process of transforming their operation to an all-perennial grass farm to raise grass-fed beef, sheep, and pastured poultry and pork. The farmer practices rotational grazing and has also planted fruit trees that provide shade for his animals and additional carbon-capture capacity. His integrated approach to farming reflects an emerging practice known as silvopasture in which the management of trees for timber or fruit is integrated with the production of pastured livestock and their forage.

This type of diversified agriculture especially makes sense for Wisconsin when you consider the history of our lands. “We had huge amounts of carbon stored in soil beneath our diverse prairie systems. Over 8,000 years, our grasslands—which co-evolved with ruminants (like bison)—were responsible for building up the deep, carbon-rich soils” that make Wisconsin so well suited for agriculture, Mayerfeld says. Shifting to agricultural systems that more closely reflect this history is an exciting new development that holds great potential for healthier farms and a cleaner planet. While

Bill Sturm, Oshkosh City Forester & Landscape Operations Manager, stands in front of a young redbud tree planted by the city to help capture rainfall. Sturm’s work is part of a larger, statewide initiative through 1000 Friends of Wisconsin that draws on a U.S. Forest Service grant through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to reduce runoff and improve water quality.

Nancy Bozek (left), a UW–Stevens Point faculty member and Director of the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association, and Wisconsin DNR Region Team Supervisor Andrew Sorenson (right) talk with Kevin Ponsler (center), a Procurement Manager for Biewer Lumber, about to how to responsibly harvest a forested area in Wood County while maximizing its capacity for carbon capture.

this effort is still in its early stages, Mayerfeld is enthusiastic: “We want to make this shift in a big way.”

Totaling over 14 million acres, Wisconsin’s forests represent a significant carbon sink for our state. Current management of these forests is intended to balance a variety of needs, from animal habitat to recreation to timber harvesting. However, most management plans don’t explicitly consider carbon storage.

Managing forests for carbon storage can include a variety of practices: extending the time between tree harvests, thinning trees to ensure that the healthiest ones can thrive, and selecting species that are well-suited for a given planting location and hardy to the effects of climate change and pests like the emerald ash borer. Including these kinds of practices in forest management—along with statewide efforts in reforestation and afforestation (planting trees in previously un-forested areas)—could dramatically increase carbon storage potential for Wisconsin.

Of course, these natural climate solutions are more effective when implemented on more acres. Fred Clark describes how a program called My Wisconsin Woods powerfully leverages this concept. A partnership between the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and several other entities, My Wisconsin Woods provides private forest owners across the state with resources and technical assistance to engage in meaningful forest stewardship.

While some programs specifically work with large, institutional landholders of 100,000 acres or more, My Wisconsin Woods primarily works with families who own smaller forested acreages. This group of owners “makes up the majority of forest ownership in the state collectively,” according to Clark. Yet, he notes, “they’re also the hardest audience to reach and work with [because] many family forest owners are absentee owners who only visit their land occasionally.” Too, there’s frequent turnover. “On average, every seven years a family forest parcel is either sold or transferred to a new family member.”

My Wisconsin Woods uses social media, marketing, and other tools to provide information to new and long-time forest owners and get them more engaged in forest stewardship. The program provides information on everything from wildlife management to climate change to invasive species management—all the various facets that Clark says are important for considering forest health and productivity. By deploying tailored tactics for different kinds of landowners and speaking to a variety of possible motivations that family forest owners may have, My Wisconsin Woods has been highly successful in “creating a critical mass for landscape-scale impact” on climate change.

This kind of widespread, active engagement in forest management is becoming increasingly important, Clark says, because “we know that forests are one of our best sinks for carbon in the U.S. and in the world. … But forests are also under stress because of droughts, floods, and other impacts of climate change like increased introduction of invasive species. More than ever, people who care about forests are recognizing that we need to be active stewards. There are fewer and fewer cases where we can leave forests to their own devices and assume they’ll get better.”

However, effective stewardship can be a lot of work for forest owners. “The art is to try to balance their many goals in a way that is affordable and best meets the individual needs of forest owners so they’re willing to stay in the stewardship game,” says Clark. Whether you are a family forest owner who uses your land for recreation or growing timber—or both—chances are you already have some kind of plan to manage your forest. “We keep stacking needs and goals onto our forests,” says Clark, “and the need for our forests to help solve our climate problem is one more goal that we increasingly need to consider, and that forest owners are starting to consider.”

From the first forms of algae in our ancient oceans to the perennial grasses and fast-growing trees of today, nature has always found myriad ways to manage carbon in our atmosphere. Yet our planet’s innate capacity for handling carbon has been overwhelmed over the past hundred years by the rapid emission of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. There are well–known and effective ways to curb these emissions, from reducing our personal energy consumption to employing renewable technologies like wind and solar power. However, natural climate solutions offer a unique opportunity for us to take advantage of our abundance of productive land, soil, and water in Wisconsin to capture the carbon that is already out there. Combined with major emissions reductions and a massive implementation of renewable energy projects, natural climate solutions can greatly accelerate our progress toward a cleaner, greener future.

ACADEMY ISSUES NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS REPORT

From October 2018 to May 2020, the Wisconsin Academy regularly brought together a network of leaders from academia, public agencies, nonprofits, tribal nations, farms, and forestry to examine and develop a wide variety of cross-cutting strategies for advancing natural climate solutions in Wisconsin. From these meetings the Academy developed Natural Climate Solutions for Wisconsin: Critical Considerations & Strategies, a report detailing promising strategies for advancing natural climate solutions and equitably addressing climate change in Wisconsin. The report is available for download as a PDF at wisconsinacademy.org/NCS4WI.

Catie DeMets is the Academy’s Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives coordinator. She brings an array of experience in sustainable food systems development and a commitment to building equitable and resilient communities to the Academy staff. DeMets has a BA in Geology and Environmental Studies from Lawrence University and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, where she graduated as a Bertha Morton Fellow in May 2018.

FOUR EXHIBITIONS, DEFERRED

JODY CLOWES

If this were a normal 2020, the James Watrous Gallery would be featuring solo shows by artists Robin Jebavy and Andrew Redington over the summer months and then Kyoung Ae Cho and Dakota Mace in the fall. However, as the gallery will be closed until Overture Center for the Arts can confidently reopen, all of their exhibits have been postponed. In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy this small sampling of these four Wisconsin artists’ incredible work.

Andrew Redington, Roundabout, 2016. Sculpture, upcycled furniture, canvas, 70 by 70 by 30 inches.

Robin Jebavy, Plate with Wreath (Mary Nohl’s Sunrise over Lake Michigan)*, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 68 by 67 inches. *The artist Mary Nohl lived and worked in Fox Point, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

ROBIN JEBAVY Brookfield, Wisconsin

Robin Jebavy, J.S. Bach’s Organ, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 70 by 84 inches.

Robin Jebavy makes paintings with a dizzying, kaleidoscopic impact. They describe a shimmering infinite field, with no apparent limits and a teasingly ambiguous depth of field. Layers of transparent hues are interrupted by shafts of reflected light, creating brilliant highlights within a rich interplay of colors. The effect is almost hallucinatory, like an ecstatic vision composed in stained glass.

She begins each painting by photographing arrangements of thrift store plates, serving dishes, and glasses filled with colored water. By layering and mirroring these images in Photoshop, she creates a structure that can be projected on canvas as a starting point. Working loosely at first, Jebavy gradually builds up the painting, adding new elements as the image evolves. There’s an alchemical aspect to her process, transforming repeated images of cheap glassware into sumptuous, radiant canvases.

Andrew Redington, Dischairge, 2015. Print from furniture parts, 36 by 36 inches.

ANDREW REDINGTON Berlin, Wisconsin

Andrew Redington, Thwarted Stool, 2015. Print from chair parts, 32 by 20 inches.

Trained in woodworking, Andrew Redington has a long-held fascination with furniture form. His sculptures are made by deconstructing old pieces—chairs, wardrobes, sideboards, and vanities—and reconfiguring their parts into unexpected shapes. While the final form may be radically new, the original furniture elements are recognizable, and Redington often applies strong color to emphasize their individuality while adding visual resonance.

Several years ago, Redington began making prints directly from his sculptures, inking impressions from them as if they were huge woodblocks. More recently, he has been creating prints with individual furniture parts, using color to enliven and isolate the different elements. The warm wood-grain, familiar shapes, and lively compositions give these abstractions a playful quality, as if old chairs and tables, left alone in the attic, had begun to dance.

Kyoung Ae Cho, Excess I, 2014–2019 (detail). Crabapple pedicels, burn marks, thread, and matte medium on canvas, 24 by 24 inches.

KYOUNG AE CHO Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Kyoung Ae Cho, Spring, 2019 (detail). Leaves collected in spring, burn marks, thread, matte medium, and Korean rice paper on canvas, 12 by 12 inches.

Kyoung Ae Cho is engaged in a conversation with nature. Encompassing sculpture, installation, and fiber-based works, her art is grounded in an intimate dialogue with her materials. Cho starts each piece by mindfully gathering and preparing organic matter and objects of little value, attending to the way their physical properties reveal nature’s language of growth and change. As she explains, “Each meditative, repetitive gesture, each cut, stitch, and placement is part of the experience of merging the natural and the man-made, the physical and the spiritual.”

Cho’s patient, collaborative approach to working with natural materials is a poignant metaphor for our relationship with the environment. At a time when we are facing the twin crises of intense climate change and species loss, the humility and tenderness of her process offer both hope and inspiration.

Dakota Mace, Dootł’izh, 2018. Handmade abaca paper, seeds, indigo dye, 12 by 16 ½ inches.

DAKOTA MACE Madison, Wisconsin

Dakota Mace, Na’ashch’ąą’ I–IV, 2018. Digital archive prints of scanned cyanotypes, 24 by 24 inches each.

Dakota Mace extends the vocabulary of traditional weaving to re-interpret the Diné (Navajo) concept of balance within nature. Her art often centers on the symmetry of the four-pointed motif representing Na’ashjéii Asdzáá, or Spiderwoman, who brought weaving to the Diné, as well as the four sacred colors and mountains of Diné culture. While Mace’s work can be appreciated purely for its graphic power and sensitive use of color, it is also a rare and generous offering: a window into the world of the Diné.

Mace is skilled in several media, including weaving, beadwork, papermaking, and photography. As with the work above, she often favors alternative photography processes, translating traditional motifs into the language of contemporary art. No matter what medium she chooses, Mace weaves in her understanding of the symbolic abstractions in the Diné creation story.

JUNK SHED

BY JACQUELYN THOMAS

My father eats braunschweiger sandwiches, thick ones he squeezes tight to hold together. He holds them with the hand that’s missing a finger. Bread fills in the empty space. It bulges out like a roll of fat. His good hand is taking a nap. It’s a boulder that doesn’t move beside his plate.

Illustration by Laura Ovberg

JUDGE’S NOTES

Only cousins ever ask about that finger. He makes them guess. Bobcat? Wolf? Vampire Bat? Then he says my name and laughs. She eats everything. Nobody ever calls him a liar.

Mom comes to the table with a cup of coffee and smooths lotion into her arms, swooping it over her shoulders and up her long neck. She’s June pink from the garden but will be nut brown by July. “Best change out of those school clothes,” she says. A warm patch of happiness swells in my belly. I push it to my toes and swing my feet beneath the table. My dress is for everyday now, I remind her, because this day was a half-day and the last day of school.

“Got work to do,” he says. “Don’t nobody want to be seeing your underpants.” I don’t have to look at him to know how his tongue is working through a clay-colored mess.

“Junk shed,” Mom says, hands tangling like two squirming kittens. “Spreader’s waiting. Couple of scour calves in it.” She lifts her cup. There’s a creamy clot of lotion between the wing bones of her throat. Jergen’s. Folger’s. Silver Spring Horseradish. The kitchen is churning with smells. Zippo. Pall Mall. “Get a move on,” he says, scraping back his chair. “Don’t got all day.” I take my own sweet time and drink slowly, never lifting my eyes from the milk in my glass until the screen door slams behind him. I wipe my mouth and look. The smoke he left behind curdles in the noonday sun. That finger was bitten by a barn door. Long before I was born. It got the gangrene and then it was gone. Mom told me. I never ask him a thing. Not if I can help it. “Junk shed,” Mom says, rapping the table to get my attention. She swallows the last of her coffee while standing at the sink and follows my father outside.

Once a year we empty the junk shed and start over. It’s nothing like a holiday, which is what the first day of summer vacation should be. It’s a little bit like clearing out a school desk, except that was easy—scuffed box of crayons, warped ruler, chewed up pencils, baby scissors—nothing I want for fifth grade. In the junk shed are things we can’t burn. Heaps of tin cans and CHLOE BENJAMIN piles of busted jars and broken bottles. After I shovel them in, the manure spreader will spit them out, into a sinkhole by the barb-wire fence. In this vivid and tender story, gender roles, The gym shorts I brought home are musty. I pull them on anyway, under sex, and power are masterfully rendered my dress, and step into last-year’s loafers. There’s a bucket on the counter for table scraps. I slap its lid tight. I’ll do my chores, I tell the creaky screen through the daily interactions and door, in the order I want. violence of the natural world—all in stylish

and visceral prose. Only a few sugar maples shade the hen yard. The chicken coop is dark and dusty. When the last blinking chicken flusters past, I slop table scraps out behind them. There they are. Sure enough. Maggots. The rooster gets to them first, planting his reptilian feet in a pile of brothers and sisters. I know a lot about maggots because I know a lot about flies. I like watching chickens eat. Their beaks pop down and right back up. They nibble and consider things. They discuss stuff. Chickens have good manners. I suppose it’s the rooster who trains them, but I don’t like how he does it, singling one out to blindside with trouble. Maybe her friends will take a few jittery sidesteps, but they mind their own business and keep on pecking. It would be impolite to stare. They pretend not to notice his beak at her neck. His great thorny feet digging into her back. Her breast pressed into the ground. They won’t look up until he hops off, shaking his tail feathers like guess I showed her. Then they watch only him. Strutting his stuff, puffing up, and wobbling his ugly red wattle. I have a rock in the nest of my lap. If that rooster is of a mind to teach someone, anyone, something or anything today, I’ll knock him senseless. The hen house is at the hem of the hilltop we live on. Below it a steep road and chilly creek run like two skinny legs down to the bottomlands. Pigeon Lane tip-toes slow and shady past an outcropping of rock faces guarding our woods, before breaking out in a straight sunny

sprint to the mailbox. I won’t go any further than that all summer: standing on a gummy lip of blacktop at the end of our dusty road, prying open a zinc mailbox. None of the letters will be for me. I know this. What I don’t know is who I’ll be when the school bus carries me away from there again. The giddiness of summer isn’t three months without school, it’s the excitement of the surprise you might be to yourself when you return.

A barn door rumbles behind me. I jump up. Stepping from that dark mouth is my father. Swinging my bucket to prove I’m doing something, even if it isn’t the something I’m supposed to be doing, I head back up toward the house, and the junk shed standing beside it.

He doesn’t notice. There’s a heifer tied up in the barnyard, haltered to a fence beside the milk house. He checks to see that the knots are tight before moseying on down to her other end. Then he stands there. Holding her tail. Doing nothing. Only taking a good long look. Me too, standing in the shadow between our house and the junk shed, tractor, and manure spreader.

None of my cousins have a junk shed, though most of them live on farms. It’s nothing to talk about, what families do with trash, but we do get around to every outbuilding eventually and I’ve never seen another junk shed. People who live in town must talk about it. Their garbage is somebody’s business and they owe it to everybody to have it to the street on time.

I rinse the scrap bucket out with the garden hose and set it on the porch to dry. I think our back porch was somebody’s front porch, long ago. Three slender poles rise like spindles and blossom into lacy fans. People probably came by here once, in buggies, to sit and visit on this porch, back in olden times, before the yard fell off. Ten paces out, an iron curlicue gate opens onto nothing. Long grasses tumble through its fence, hanging like shaggy bangs over a salt lick and water tank. The other end of that fence almost connects to the junk shed but doesn’t quite reach. Instead it sags into itself and curls away, making room for crumbling steps that end in a boot-sucking river of cow shit and clay. Tractors are stronger than cars, which is why our front porch is a cobbled-on back porch, with a freezer and woodpile inside.

I wrap a post in the crook of my arm. It’s smooth and warm. Leaning out, I threaten to drop myself, letting the belly of my arm slide until one hand snatches me up short and the other, glides into view at my side. Above me, wasps so skinny I can’t see their waists are building a nest. It looks like an empty corn cob becoming an empty sunflower. My fingers begin to give. At the very last second, I jerk myself back and grab on. I am both the hero and the happy damsel on the stage of this long narrow porch, taking a bow and kissing my own hand. A barn cat passes by but doesn’t look.

If I could rescue anyone, it would be Mom. We’d go to town. She’d have a butter-yellow kitchen with breezy curtains, fat tulips on the table, and a window so close to the neighbor lady’s house she could lean out to chat or pass her a sugary pie. Out back would be a stoop for snapping peas and a come-along laundry-line for pulling in fresh sheets and sending out damp dishtowels. Up front there’d be a wide columned porch and brisk flag, with a whistling mailman climbing its steps, a garden just for flowers, and a silver trashcan.

I wish I’d been born to live in town. That’s what I’m thinking—posed like a jewelry box ballerina, bare foot against one knee, an arm sweeping up overhead—until I remember wasps, the live wires of their legs too close to my hand.

I learned about me by reading a piece of junk mail. Life Science Library. Limited Time Offer. Time-Life Books. A cartoon kid had a question. What does a baby do for the nine months it is inside its mother? I’d never thought of it before, the time between my birthday in June and a wedding in December the year before.

Here is a trick I know. A bucket half-full of water is also half-full of air. If I stand in the middle of our half-yard swinging my arm like a windmill, I can make the air make the water stay inside. It can go on like this forever, so long as my arm keeps up, and not a drop will splash on my head. Now I’m wondering how it will work if I swing the bucket sideways and I’m the one spinning. My ears are full of wind and blood pumping, but I catch the tail end of a whistle and my name barked out. I stop short. The water sloshes.

It’s only Mom, bringing Rodney to the tank for water. I wave so she knows I heard her and to show her I’m walking drunk, but that I know what I’m supposed to be doing and heading for the junk shed. The world is nearly steady, my ears almost empty of sound, when a great

and grinding gear shifts. Something heavy is clearing its throat to make the climb up our hill. A dust plume evaporates along the bottomlands and flashes of silver wink between the trees. I whirl through the grass to find my missing shoe and head up without my foot is firmly in it. Beyond the junk shed. Past the garden. In between new carrots and nettles.

Frank the milkman is fat. He wears white coveralls that never get dirty and black rubber boots that shine like church shoes. The cab of his truck is two-stories-tall. He fills up its wide window. “School out already?” Frank doesn’t have any kids. Summer comes to him by surprise. He’s patting his top pockets, looking for a pen, when it’s already right there in his hand, on the clipboard he uses for measurements.

I’m leaning against the scratchy wall of the milk house, picking lime scales from the rough boards with my fingernails, waiting for him to climb down. He’s considering a tiny pair of brown bottles, twisting them this way and that, before writing their numbers down. His hands are plump as dinner rolls and dimpled like a baby’s. The bottles clink when he plops them inside a pocket. He stuffs a couple of rubber gloves in there to keep them quiet.

There’s a hole in the milk house behind me with a door like an upside-down mailbox. I find it with my fingers while Frank feels around for his cap. This is where the hose of his milk truck snakes in to connect to the spigot of the bulk tank. I spring the latch and wait.

Frank has to lean out of his own way to dig beneath his stomach for a side pocket. He drags out a tangled wad and sorts it. Frank has a lot of curly black hair, too much for a hair net. Shower caps, paper hats from the veterinarian, even ladies’ rain bonnets from the dime store don’t work. For a while he wore a pink bathing cap, but his head broke out in a heat rash. Frank is a very sweaty man. His round face glistens like cheese. He keeps handkerchiefs in both back pockets to mop his forehead and to sponge beneath his chins. It was his mother who suggested the wig caps. He lives with her and she has a dresser drawer full. He pulls one on now, so low that it squishes his face shut. “Ready to pull off this caper?”

I laugh because I like him and because I’m ready. “After you,” I say, lifting the milk hose door. He gives me a snort and plucks at the top of his head so that his face falls out full fold.

Frank comes down from the milk truck backwards. Step by step his feet find one another. His hand on the hoist bar is squeaking along. He takes his time. The truck bounces on its springs. There’s a ladder up the side of the long silver tank with a submarine hatch above it. I watch it in case any milk sloshes out.

“Go ahead, sweet-pea. I left it on for you.”

There’s a radio in the barn, but not in our house, and I’m not allowed in the barn, or the milk house, though I’ve watched Frank through its grimy window enough times to know what he does in there and he knows what I do in here. I make myself comfortable then scoot up again to roll the dial. I don’t really much care what I’m listening to, but I change the stations a lot. It’s the sinking back into Frank’s seat that feels good, like a bubble bath, if a bubble bath could smell like aftershave. There’s only one seat in the milk truck. It’s for the driver. Where the other one should be, sits a cooler full of butter and cheese. If we take some, it comes out of the milk check.

Once he’s on the ground, Frank is sure-footed and quick. He lifts the heavy hose, threading its silver nose into the milk house, and steps inside at the side door to tug it through. He picks coverall out of his behind when he thinks I can’t see him.

My father doesn’t want me in the milk house or barn because he doesn’t want me any place and never wanted me at all. That’s what I learned from Time-Life Books without ever reading one. Girls belong in the house. That’s his excuse. Doesn’t he know Mom’s a girl? Sometimes I wonder, she says.

Frank whistles while he works. He’s come back outside to flip on the pump of his truck.

“Hey, Frank, a puddle of glue hardened up in my desk and it looked just like a rabbit.”

“That so?”

“I forgot to close it after my insect poster. Do you know houseflies lay 150 eggs at a time?”

“You don’t say.”

“They hatch into maggots in just one day and make a cocoon called a pupa in five.”

“Is that right?”

“A few days later, when the fly comes out, it stays the same size until it dies.”

“Well, what do you know about that.” Frank stands a moment blotting his face before heading back inside.

The female housefly’s lifetime supply of eggs is fertilized in a single split-second. Happens all the time. Two flies land beside one another and explode. It’s a buzzing you don’t need to hear twice to know what it means. They’re easier to swat while they’re at it, because they’re weak and dizzy. Small flies are not babies, they’re just underfed. Mothers of fat flies secreted them well.

I wrap my arms around the warm steering wheel and rock it to a song about rain. Frank’s windshield is clean as the sky without a raincloud in sight. I’m staring at the ass-end of Rodney, looking at what the cousins call his nuts. Rodney has muskmelons dropped inside him, same as we hang onions in old nylons from the rafters of our cellar. He’s bumpy there, but moist as an orange and alive.

Rodney eats his way around the farm all summer. Under the crab apple trees. Next to the garden. Around the sinkhole out in the oat field where the tractor can’t go and in a patch of grass beneath the wind- My father doesn’t want me in mill. He has a heavy silver ring in his nose. I’ve watched him spin it, snaking his black tongue up one nostril, then twisting and hunching the milk house or barn because it like a giant leech, until his ring begins to roll like it’s moving on its own. A fat chain connects the ring in Rodney’s nose to another one he doesn’t want me any place just like it on his stake post. Mom must have left it down by the water tank. and never wanted me at all.

Rodney’s sides are swollen heavy. He’s angling to turn around. I That’s what I learned from Timewatch his heavy sack swing between the pointed bones of his backward knees. He flicks his ears once or twice to shoo away flies and Life Books without ever reading swings his rump away so that I’m looking at the side of him. He’s lined up behind that heifer, waiting his turn in line to stick his nose under one. Girls belong in the house. the board fence and stretch his tongue out into the garden. He stares at nothing while he waits. That’s his excuse.

I’m not afraid of Rodney, but I’m glad there’s a fence between us, that he’s boxed into the barnyard, and the only way out is a latched gate. He flares his nostrils, gathering in the smell of alfalfa too wet to rake, but Rodney’s in no hurry to reach the strawberry bed. It’s summer. He’s bored and unbothered. The whole world is green. He’s content to be where he is doing nothing. Me too. I don’t even mind that the song on the radio has no words.

Rodney snorts, swinging his anvil head above that heifer’s rear end like he means to move downhill, but his jawbone catches between the sharp sails of her hips. He stumbles, then barrels forward upon her. His thin ankles tremble to find their center. The towering bulk of his shoulders bend that heifer in half. She curtsies and shuffles. Rodney’s forelegs dangle like useless arms. One step too many, and her throat is thrust up against the rough fence, halter tightening at her lashed muzzle. Her lip is caught. Folded back from stubby teeth. Pink tongue thrashing. A lather of slobber piles up and her eyes are bulging, wrenched back to look inside her own head, but she doesn’t make a sound.

A twitching stalk slips out of Rodney—shiny as peeled horseradish, bright as rhubarb, sharp as new asparagus—rooted in the frayed cuff where his piss pounds out. It swings, searching the full-length of his belly, as his chin scoots up the ramp of the heifer’s spine. He rests his throat between her shoulders and lets his gaze sweep lazily across the garden, ignorant of his own heaving belly.

I’m about to blow Frank’s horn to scare Rodney off when Mom walks out of the milk house carrying a bucket full of berries. She’s talking, but I can’t hear her over the pump motor and low-groaning gurgle that means the bulk tank is almost empty. Frank steps out behind her. They don’t look at me, sitting up here in the truck, and they don’t look at Rodney, dropping from that heifer and snorting snot onto the ground. And I don’t look at them, but I see them, in the tall side-mirror of Frank’s truck.

Frank flips off the pump switch and leans against his silver bullet tank. Mom chatters on about pies. He should be dragging out the milk transfer hose, but she is crinkling her eyes against the sun and tilting her head, exposing her long soft neck. She tucks a curl behind her ear and lingers at its lobe, twisting it like a mama cat’s nipple when a blind new kitten doesn’t latch on. Frank tugs off the wig cap and stuffs it in his pocket. The moment his hand comes back she snatches it. He clutches his clipboard tight to his chest. A sting so slight I barely see it pricks my mother’s face. She swings the handle of her ice-cream bucket onto his fleshy palm and closes his fingers upon it.

“The plumpest ones,” she says, leaning in like it’s a secret, “are the sweetest.”

Frank looks past her, embarrassed or dizzy, and my mother laughs. A waspish tightness darkens the sound. She reaches below Frank’s belly, where the bucket wobbles against his thigh, and peels its lid back with a slow ripping sound. She fishes out a strawberry and hikes herself up on tiptoe to bring it to his mouth. Frank’s lips go rubbery and wobble with his chins. He’s staring over her shoulder at the milk house when he bites the berry between her fingers. His face is the color of quicklime. A dribble of juice stains the front of his coveralls. I can’t look.

“You tell your mother,” I hear her say, “the trick to growing strawberries like that is to thin out the bed so isn’t overcrowded, you hear?” Gravel crunches. Mom’s walking off like she told somebody, and the milk hose clatters its tin doorway. Hand over hand Frank is reeling it in.

Stiff calves pile up like cordwood all winter. They limber up in I bury them in junk. Tin cans. springtime, thawing in prettily coated heaps. There are two dead calves in the manure spreader. Propped beside them is a sad shovel. Glass jars. Plastic bottles. A These calves died in June and never hardened at all. Their graceful little legs fold delicately, this way and that, and their ears are soft and whole year’s worth. The first sweet. They have long pretty eyelashes and glacier-blue eyes. Their half goes quick and I lean like hips jut out, but in the middle they’re flat as a hide, with fur that is curly in places, the way it gets when mothers lick them. Their own a winded farmer should on the pink tongues loll between milk teeth. Nobody notices these teeth when they’re alive. Cows, even baby ones, don’t smile. handle of a wide-bottomed I bury them in junk. Tin cans. Glass jars. Plastic bottles. A whole year’s worth. The first half goes quick and I lean like a winded farmer shovel. It makes me sad to should on the handle of a wide-bottomed shovel. It makes me sad to think how this shovel is for corn and oats, things that some things think how this shovel is for never taste, but calves die all the time. Maybe their mothers drop them too soon. Maybe they strangle on the way out. Maybe they freeze to corn and oats, things that some death before reaching the barn. Maybe they drown in a creek or get things never taste, but calves eaten by bobcats or wolves. Maybe. But usually, they just get the scours and shit themselves to death. It doesn’t matter. Their mothers won’t die all the time. know. They’ll keep on making milk no matter who needs it. No telling what this junk shed was, when it was new, long ago. It’s two-stories tall but has only one floor. There used to be a half-floor like a porch that had moved inside. Its leg poles weren’t pretty, just regular barn posts, with cobwebs. My father knocked it down because it was wobbly and served no purpose. One of the aunts thought this might have been a summer kitchen, where women took the heat when they couldn’t stand it in the kitchen. But Mom said, where’s the chimney

then? and nobody could answer. It’s not a root cellar, they said, its windows would make the potatoes go bad. That made no sense to me. Ours go bad all the time in a cellar without any windows. Potatoes will let their eyes grow no matter where you put them. The uncles ruled out a buggy shed, because the door is just a door. But it had to be for something, set next to the house like this, and up against an old road like that. Maybe it was just a junk shed. Maybe back in the olden days even country folks had somebody else to come pick up their trash.

The barn door slides open. I hear it rumble as I close the latch. My parents are done with milking chores and I am done with mine. Just in time. She’ll come down to start dinner and he’ll climb onto this tractor, to spit our junk out, close to the sinkhole as he can get it. Then we’ll sit again at the table and feel the light of day lift from us.

When it’s dark, I’ll burn the paper trash. Cereal and macaroni boxes. Empty flour and sugar sacks. Calf powder bags brought down from the barn. And junk mail. All layered beneath a maple tree and soaked with gasoline. I’ll light a kitchen match.

Jacquelyn Thomas recently returned to the Driftless Area, after living more than thirty years in a Madison housing project where she served as director of an on-site community learning center. Her non-fiction work has been published by Proximity Magazine and is forthcoming in the spring issue of Fourth Genre as runner-up in the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest.

Read award-winning fiction from new and established Wisconsin writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction.

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2020 FICTION & POETRY CONTEST WINNERS FICTION WINNERS POETRY WINNERS

First Prize

Jacquelyn Thomas Dodgeville

“Junk Shed”

Second Prize

Jennifer Morales Viroqua

“Wiseacres”

Third Prize

Barbara Kriegsmann Sister Bay “Without Provisions”

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS

“Headfirst,” Kata Beilin – Madison “little blind flying mice,” Steve Fox – Hudson “Mazo,” Mary Ellen Gabriel – Madison “Nefertiti in the Afternoon,” Karen Loeb – Eau Claire “What’s Best, ” Andrew McDonnell – Beaver Dam “I Touched Leviathan, ” Jeff Snowbarger – Stevens Point “Morrow’s Nut House After Hours, ” Allison Uselman – Madison

JOIN US

First Prize

Susan Martell Huebner Mukwonago

“1967”

Second Prize

Kathryn Gahl Appleton

“Sister”

Third Prize

Dominic W. Holt Monona “Liquirizia”

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS

“At the Birth of a Third Daughter, On the Eve of World War,”

Ingrid Andersson – Madison “Bleu Blew Azul, ” S.M. Blakeley – Beloit “Of Many Wings, ” Rachel Durfee – Madison “I Want to Speak of Want, ” Elisabeth Harrahy – Oconomowoc “Brown Study,” Dawn Hogue – Sheboygan “He Screams,” Jackie Langtieg – Verona “In Which Woolly Mammoths Save the World, Starting with Siberia, Because Permafrost is Melt and Carbon is Release,”

Jill Madden Melchoir – Green Bay “Village Post Office, ” Melaney Poli – White Lake “Thermos, ” Guy Thovaldsen – Madison

Join us on Thursday, October 29, at 5:00 pm for a special online Wisconsin Book Festival reading with our 2020 contest winners at wisconsinacademy.org/2020reading.

THANKS TO OUR 2020 CONTEST JUDGES Chloe Benjamin (fiction) and Oscar Mireles (poetry), as well as to preliminary readers CX Dillhunt and Jodi Vander Molen. All contest judging is done blindly and the winning submissions are selected on criteria established by individual judges. CONTEST WINNERS RECEIVE CASH AND PRIZES of $500 to $100, publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas, and a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. First-place winners in both categories also receive a one-week writers’ residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point.

THANKS TO OUR 2020 CONTEST SPONSORS:

WISCONSIN BOOK FESTIVAL

New Wisconsin Poetry

1967

It was that summer 19 years old I lived alone fevered with independence efficiency apartment on Summit Avenue scratch cushions pull-out couch Goodwill dishes my boyfriend and I drank liquor from jelly glasses pounded the thin mattress even flatter ignored the metal frame bruising our backs

It was that summer freedom meant working Wisconsin Bell Telephone Company long distance operator 26th & Highland on the roof men with rifles protecting the communications center claimed danger of rioting a takeover IDs required in the lobby no one spoke on the elevators the cafeteria on break cut corn and meatloaf slabs steaming on shiny white plates I squirted ketchup a co-worker slapped spoonful of mayonnaise when I asked she said lots of us use mayo and us meant black people and even though she always carried a paperback just like me us also meant different foreign

It was that summer when the three men who rented an apartment above mine thundered down the stairs heavy boots helmets camouflage rifles combat-ready National Guard my neighbors maybe the same men who jumped into the road guns shouldered at Reservoir Park a checkpoint for entering or leaving the city to discourage another claim marauding bands of armed men.

It was that summer when throwing rocks and curses was 30 seconds on the six o’clock news and sunlight burned the asphalt on the 16th Street Viaduct

Susan Martell Huebner 2020

Bedtime Quitapenas*

When your thoughts twist in swirls and spirals

When your mind drills down into grainy quicksand

And your fears range reckless on the backs of ponies

Invite them all to rest beside a whispering fir-lined pool

Allow your Soul to fly a kite against the blue-dark sky

for under your pillow a Worry Doll will grab its tail and string you along

toward the sleepy stars

Susan Martell Huebner

*Muñecas Quitapenas—Guatemalan worry dolls

Susan Martell Huebner’s poetry has appeared many times in several formats, the most recent being in the anthology Leaves of Peace, published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and her chapbook Reality Changes with the Willy Nilly Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She also has an essay in Re-Creating Our Common Chord (Wising Up Press, 2019). Huebner lives in Mukwonago with her husband and two cats, one skinny and one not.

Sister

My sister doesn’t do sad. She tried it on a few times, different styles, different sizes— nothing quite fit. Either too loud or too dark, too tight or too baggy, she’d say.

But I think it was the silence of sadness she couldn’t size up.

See, she’s a musician and she hears B major the happiest of notes in her pink roses and she weeded out E flat minor (the saddest) from between the beans because she lives in the key of wonder.

When I was little, I watched her practice piano on the windowsill before we got the upright and now her fingers glide on the bass clarinet and she loves

parades and dogs and actors on stage.

She bakes toffee bars, chimes in at book club, and will call you on the phone checking in with perfect timing and then

when it gets too quiet

she will sit at her kitchen table and hand-write a letter

to a prisoner

so when it is opened, her cursive flows like a cello deep and smooth making a little cell swell words rise from the page like high notes of a flute

measure by measure my sister’s drum roll of love

piercing the silence there.

Kathryn Gahl

Angel of Simplicity

Simplicity was the pattern-maker onionskin we would cut/cut/cut for bodice skirt and waistband the sleeve of the future, my mother said

enrolling me and my sisters in the Cleveland Merry Masters 4–H Club where we learned to sew flat-fell seams, gather skirts, line plackets

design a time to do something do you know what it was why did it take so long to find it was I asking the wrong question or was it simply (a derivative of sim-pli-city)

how I feared to ask that or more since my mother would harrumph past the ironing board on her way to the washing machine and call me argumentative while I begged

her to stop working sit down talk with me or at least buy me a dictionary

so I could look up argumentative

Kathryn Gahl

Kathryn Gahl’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in many journals and several anthologies and have won awards from Glimmer Train, Margie, and Wisconsin People & Ideas, as well as the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. Her most recent release is The Velocity of Love (Water’s Edge Press, 2020), a poetic memoir. When not playing with words, cooking, or yielding to yoga, Gahl dances red-hot ballroom. Her website is kathryngahl.com.

Liquirizia*

Tell me Grandfather did you ever try to scrub out your dark Mediterranean skin your Camels original Napolitano tongue at home at night while your family slept did you spiral and spiral about tomorrow like I do you tailoring for Louisville’s white Southerners and I white white trying to unwind the fire white devils who snake into our brains from the time we can see we can hear we can taste taste this licorice spice of privilege and have no idea.

Dominic W. Holt

*Liquirizia means “licorice” in Italian

When the Wall Clouds Come

We were married in the interludes of thunderstorms. June. Blacktop hot. The rose bushes arced in the driving sun.

I was steaming in my Michael Kors black suit that, days later, I would wear to my father’s funeral. We waited and waited

crossing our wires, messengers to and from her dressing room, a classroom in the MSU Rose Garden Visitor Center. “Go or no go?”

as Doppler radar flickered red rotating vectors. I jarred the crowd “Holy …! Finally, here she comes!” when Heather and entourage

marched out to the courtyard. The torrents and lightning lulled, broke the ninety-five-degree heat and electricity to Aunt Dorothy’s

keyboard, my brother-in-law’s microphone. Under an umbrella my brother held, the officiant clenched purse to tummy, visibly pissed

she was amid drizzle. Hit a car on the way in, her husband said when I called because she was late. I was wet to the boxers.

Heather blushed pink impatiens, rugosa rose with so many eyes on her. Her fingers jittery as sleet. We shouted our vows, paper

dimpled with drops. She was sweating too in her ivory Victorian gown. The slopes of her satin shawl smooth as icing on our

vanilla raspberry cake inside. No veil. No train. She wanted us to wait until anyone could marry. Like high school sweethearts

Josh and Scott standing paces apart in the groomsmen line, hands to themselves, as if by instinct. Or my jazz drumming cousin, Dennis,

and his partner, Mark, a middle school principal, sitting without touching, while other couples held each other close. Felt like hail

piercing my neck to see this. I pushed us to marry. Had a hunch. Like birds, day or night, sense the magnetic field of the world

and know the way home, when the wall clouds come.

Dominic W. Holt

Dominic W. Holt is a poet and macro social worker (public policy and outreach) in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Lunch Ticket, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, Plainsongs, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Driftwood Review, Lifeboat, Poetry Quarterly, and other venues.

JUDGE’S NOTES

M i c h e l l e S toc ker

OSCAR MIRELES

1967

I thought “1967” really captured the feelings and sentiment of the late 1960s as well as highlighting the emotions behind what’s happening right now in our country. It captures the free spirit of being nineteen again—old enough to begin to understand life but not having enough puzzle pieces to figure it all out. I lived in Milwaukee for a decade and many of the locations referenced were some of my familiar stomping grounds.

Sister

Sisterhood is an amazing experience when one of the sisters can step back and take it in—the glory of it all as well as the other side, the heartache. Using music as a metaphor for emotion is tricky, but the poet does it very well here. Writing is the process of piercing the silence, and this poem captures this idea perfectly.

Liquirizia

Looking to past generations of our families for the answers is a great way to begin to understand our place in the world. The notion of skin color is a highly charged issue and can quickly lead the reader in directions the author never intends. But this poem gracefully asks the question and lets us try to figure out the answer.

Maids: Poems by Abby Frucht Matter Press, 88 pages, $14.95 Reviewed by Karla Huston

Maids is Abby Frucht’s first collection of poetry, and, as she says on her website, probably her last. Too bad for us, because this nationally known author and essayist has put together an astonishing collection that has been named a finalist for a slew of prizes, including the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and the Marie Alexander Poetry Series.

In these prose poems—essentially, little stories—Frucht’s narrator recalls the women who were hired to clean and do kitchen work in her parents’ house when she was a girl living on Long Island during the ’60s and ’70s. Most of the maids are women of color, such as Ida and Della, who are both “fired/let go,” terms the six-year-old doesn’t understand. But there is also the slender, fair-skinned, redheaded maid from Finland, “her face tranquil as teacups.”

The maid with the most resonance is Cynthia, who lives in the little room upstairs with the vacuum cleaner. The narrator recalls how Cynthia’s “reedy clarinet voice squeaked when she cried” as she thought about her daughter, Wanda, a little girl the same age as the narrator. Cynthia left Wanda in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to work in the United States, and she sends her salary home so Wanda can become a doctor. Eventually Cynthia is fired for crying too much and sent back home. The narrator often wonders about Wanda, and later as an adult even tries to find her.

While Frucht is the consummate storyteller, what is startling and stunning about these poems is her use of imagery, her play with time, and her disruption of language, all of which cause readers to back up and go forward, never quite sure of their footing. These disruptions, though frustrating at times, deepen the meaning and perhaps reflect the narrator’s struggle to grapple with her privileged upbringing, as in this passage from “Occasionally”:

Occasionally what irks her is the question of syllables since doctor’s daughter has too many while she has too few not to mention commas bug her because they cause a divide between halves of a thought parts of a recollection figments of emotion no more appealing than mosquitoes they buzz in the middles of things they have no business punctuating and in addition metaphors.

It is the limited use of punctuation that gives these poems their power. The reader is asked to read and consider again what it is the narrator is telling her.

Time is fluid in these poems. The now-adult narrator slips into contemplating the racial divisions found in the Long Island of her youth, comparing them to her understanding of race in present-day Oshkosh, and then returns to the past to consider why she had no Black friends when growing up. Identity and privilege come up again and again: She is no longer “the doctor’s daughter,” but, rather, a newly divorced woman with a hysterectomy and breast cancer in her future—a future that “will make rather / a mess of some parts of her self.”

Yet humor is a sword Frucht uses to pierce the veil of racism and classism that hangs over her childhood.

Unlike rust tarnish is self limiting. Whatever. The doctor’s daughter has no clue what self limiting means perhaps … tarnish is unable to stop itself from tarnishing from not letting one see what is required to be seen in it to be understood by seeing it such as really it doesn’t matter so much the spirit in which something happens that it happens at all.

What shines through these dazzling poems is the voice of a person who is trying to transcend her learned sense of class, of racism and status. These poems will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them.

Karla Huston is a former Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2017–2018) and the author of eight chapbooks of poems, the latest of which is Grief Bone, (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her collection A Theory of Lipstick won a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and her poems have garnered three Jade Rings from the Wisconsin Writers Association.

In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams by Thomas Davis All Things that Matter Press, 381 pages, $18.99 Reviewed by Gary Jones

Tourists celebrate Door County’s Washington Island for its majestic scenery and Scandinavian heritage. But Thomas Davis’ new novel, In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, reveals the island’s lesser known history as an 1850s refuge for runaway African American slaves. According to Davis, the history surrounding a slave settlement on the island is fragmentary at best. But he was so captivated by the idea that he put aside plans for an academic local history in order to pursue a semi-fictional narrative about the escape of two families from neighboring plantations in Missouri. For In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, Davis draws from his own research on the Underground Railroad and escaped slaves to imagine an account of how, with the guidance of two freed slaves, the families make their trek north to the island where they form a community and learn to support themselves as commercial fishermen.

Davis weaves together several narrative elements to create a compelling plot. Readers experience the story from the perspective of the protagonist Joshua, a fourteen-year-old slave for whom the risky adventure serves as a coming of age. Early on in the story, Joshua considers the possibility of escape and a life beyond the fields of the plantation:

He had heard rumors of a conductor on the Underground Railroad whispered late at night in the quarters. Once his best friend, Jamie Bullock, had avowed if he ever had the chance, he would ride the railroad right off the plantation. But Joshua had thought the conductor was supposedly a woman, not a preacher. He’d never asked anybody about the rumors. He suspected now that he not only had not understood what they meant, but that he had thought they were dreams people dreamed after they had been brutalized once too often by the Overseer.

Joshua’s journey to freedom brings him and his fellow pilgrims into contact with idealistic abolitionists and callous runaway-slave hunters, both of whom are dangerous in their own way. The leader of the group, Preacher Tom Bennett, functions not only as a guide for the trek north but also as a community organizer once they arrive on the island. Bennett leads the runaway slaves in their pioneering enterprise in an environment occasionally hostile with unfamiliar weather and not a few antagonistic neighbors. Davis’s realistic description of the slaves’ pilgrimage, along with the accounts of their self-reliance—raising buildings, organizing fishing expeditions, and creating a communal sense of purpose—captivate the reader.

Davis’s novel clearly draws both stories and inspirations from his life-long career serving Native American communities. His accomplishments include helping found the College of the Menominee Nation and serving as president of both Lac Courtes Oreilles Ojibwa Community College and of Little Priest Tribal College. Through his work with native populations, he has become well aware of the obstacles that marginalized people face and the challenges they must overcome.

Davis is also a published poet, and his prose reflects a keen sense of rhythm and timing. He originally considered telling this story through a sonnet sequence, as reported in a recent interview, but ultimately chose prose, utilizing sonnets to introduce and establish a tone for each chapter. This technique serves to underscore the epic nature of In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, a well-researched and fascinating tale of how this fugitive slave settlement changed—and didn’t change—the face of Wisconsin’s Door County.

Author and poet Gary Jones summers in Door County and winters in Platteville, where he teaches at UW–Platteville after a long career as a high school English instructor. In 2019 the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published his Ridge Stories: Herding Hens, Powdering Pigs, and Other Recollections from a Boyhood in the Driftless, which won first place in the biography category of the 2020 Midwest Book Awards.

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