Wisconsin People & Ideas – Winter 2015

wisc

people & ideas

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

A Gift Given, a Gift Returned Meet Kimberly Blaeser, the new Wisconsin Poet Laureate

Fiberglass Menagerie Finding roadside Americana at Sparta’s FAST Corporation

Waterways $5.00 Vol. 61, No. 1

Winter 2015

Three Watrous Gallery artists investigate the essential nature of water

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

Contents

winter 2015 FEATURES 4 FROM THE PRESIDENT Creatures of reason, seekers of beauty

6 EDITOR’s NOTES What’s the big idea?

The Steenbock Center, offices of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 1558-9633) is published quarterly by the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters and is distributed free of charge to Wisconsin Academy members. For information about joining the Wisconsin Academy to receive this magazine, visit wisconsinacademy.org/join.

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. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address below.

Wisconsin People & Ideas The quarterly magazine of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Zachary Carlson, editorial assistant CX Dillhunt, cold reader Designed by Huston Design, Madison

7 Upfront 7 New website shares stories of Wisconsin women making history 8 Science and art collaboration explores environmental threats to human life 9 Artists find holistic care through new performing arts medicine program 10 FEllows Forum Poet and Wisconsin Academy Fellow Robin Chapman follows the footsteps of naturalist John Muir to find a poem thirty years in the making.

14 Essay Paul Lukas and Heather McCabe reveal the art and craft behind Sparta’s slice of roadside Americana: FAST Corporation

22 Profile Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser and the revelatory power of poetry. Profile by Elizabeth Wyckoff

28 Galleria James Watrous Gallery director Jody Clowes provides a glimpse of the work by the three Wisconsin artists—Sarah FitzSimons, Marsha McDonald, and John Miller—featured in Waterways.

Cover photo: Kimberly Blaeser, Lyons Township, 2015.

Photograph by Kevin J. Miyazaki

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

Photo credit: Heather McCabe

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder, executive director Jeffrey Breisach, project assistant, UW Bolz Center Rachel Bruya, exhibitions coordinator, James Watrous Gallery 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

Above: Known as “The Sparta Zoo,” the collection of weird and wonderful fiberglass creatures at FAST Corporation draws visitors from near and far. Learn more on page 14.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

1

Contents

winter 2015 READ WISCONSIN 37 READ WISCONSIN

An education in contemporary Wisconsin fiction.

38 FIctiON

“Swimming to Saba,” a short story by first-time author and Sturgeon Bay surgeon Shaun Melarvie.

39 Book Reviews 39 Elizabeth Wyckoff reviews The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac,

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

by John Hildebrand

41 Joan Sanstadt reviews The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County: A Novel,

by Jerry Apps

44 Poetry

Poems by former Wisconsin Poets Laureate Bruce Dethlefsen and

Marilyn Taylor.

47 WISCONSIN ACADEMY ANNUAL RePORT

Featuring highlights of 2014 and a message of gratitude to the members, donors, partners, and friends who make our work possible.

L e t t e r S

t o

t h e

e d i t o r

Dear Jason, I’ve been meaning for some time to send a note of appreciation for the Fall 2014 issue. It was so fine! Talk about fulfilling the mission of linking science, arts and letters—something for everyone! Norb Blei, Martha and Randall [from the Watrous Gallery], citizen science, etc. Learned of Phox for the first time.

I particularly want to thank you for the “Editor’s Notes,” for telling us about Shade Haven, and for Jane Elder’s essay on the value of arts.

I feel the work of the Academy has never been more important.

—Sharon Gaskill, Black Earth Dear Jason, Thanks for the lovely, latest issue. I read the thing cover to cover. I was especially excited to read the Norbert Blei profile. I was fortunate to receive the Blei-Derleth Nonfiction Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers last spring, but I spent much of the awards luncheon inquiring as to just who Blei was. Myles Dannhausen’s work sure answered that.

The Academy does so much for our state. Keep it up.

—BJ Hollars, Eau Claire Dear Jason, Great piece on tribalism/mybalism (“Customer First, Citizen Last”) in the recent issue. I am with you on the narcissistic atomization of the republic in a big way.

—Larry Nesper, Madison

2

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Connecting Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world—since 1870.

Officers of the Board President: Linda Ware President-elect: Tim Size Immediate-past President: Millard Susman Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: James W. Perry Vice President of Sciences: Richard Burgess Vice President of Arts: Marianne Lubar Vice President of Letters: Cathy Cofell-Mutschler Statewide Board 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 UW Board Leadership Program Robert Brothers, Madison Ryan Dunk, Madison Officers of the Academy Foundation President: Jack Kussmaul Vice President: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Foundation Directors Jane Elder Terry Haller Millard Susman Linda Ware

Contents

NEWS for

MEMBERS We’re looking for a few great volunteers of all stripes!

Donate your time and knowledge to the Wisconsin Academy by becoming a volunteer. We’re looking for volunteers to help with the following regular and seasonal needs at our Madison headquarters: • Data entry and filing. We’re looking for a reliable volunteer with great attention to detail to work with staff to update files and records of our meetings and events. Basic computer skills are essential, but we’ll train you on how to use our system.

• Historian. As we approach our 145th anniversary, we’re renewing efforts to capture the thoughts and stories of the people who have made the Academy what it is today.

If you are a history detective with a knack for writing, we’ve got the perfect project for you!

• Garden and grounds. Our office garden and grounds are maintained

by Academy staff. We could sure use help for spring planting to fall clean-up, as well as creative ideas for low-maintenance landscaping that is beautiful and good for the environment.

• Office furnishings and décor. Are you a thrift store genius or do you know of lightly used office furnishings we could adopt?

• Minor building renovation. Our 1922 University Avenue office space is over seventy years old and could use a handy-person (or two) to help with painting and basic maintenance.

If you are interested in any of these opportunities to volunteer, please contact Elysse Lindell at elindell@ wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692 x10.

C

o

n

t

r

i

b

u

t

o

r

s

Jody Clowes is director of the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery. With years of experience developing and curating exhibitions, running gallery programs, and writing about art, Clowes has worked for the Milwaukee Art Museum and UW–Madison’s Design Gallery. She and her family have called Madison home since 1994.

Robin Chapman is a poet, painter, and developmental psycholinguist.

A professor emerita of communicative disorders at UW–Madison and emerita principal investigator at the Waisman Center, Chapman since 1996 has been co-organizer of the UW Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. She is author of nine books of poetry, including One Hundred White Pelicans (2013) and, with physicist J.C. Sprott, Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (2005). Her mathematical poems have appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and the 2009 poetry anthology Strange Attractors. Chapman is a 2014 Wisconsin Academy Fellow.

Helen Klebesadel has taught courses and workshops on creativity, studio art, and the contemporary women’s art movement for two decades. She is currently director of the Women’s Studies Consortium in the UW–Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Since 2013 Klebesadel has also been the director of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program.

Paul Lukas is a columnist for ESPN.com, where he writes “Uni Watch,” the sports world’s foremost (okay, only) column devoted to uniform design. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, but fell in love with Wisconsin in 1996 and tries to visit at least once every year.

Heather McCabe is a writer and editor from Brooklyn, New York.

When not taking snapshots of curious phenomena, she hosts a karaoke series, runs footraces, and publishes TwoBuckroo.com, a blog that aims to revitalize the $2 bill by fostering and tracking its use.

Shaun Melarvie is a general surgeon living in Door County. His native state is North Dakota, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of North Dakota with a major in English Literature and minors in Biology and Chemistry. An honorable mention story in the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Fiction Contest, “Swimming to Saba” is Melarvie’s first published work.

Kevin J. Miyazaki is a photographer whose work appears in a wide variety of publications, including Bon Appétit, ESPN, Reader’s Digest, GQ, and AARP. He lives in Wauwautosa. His artwork focuses on themes of family history, memory, and architectural space. Frequently featured in Wisconsin Academy programs and publications, Miyazaki’s photographs can also be found at KevinMiyazaki.com.

Joan Sanstadt is the former news editor at Agri-view. Her entire career has been spent in a variety of roles within the newspaper industry.

Recently retired, she is working on a series of children’s books and plans on writing her memoirs.

Elizabeth Wyckoff is a freelance writer living in Madison. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and her fiction is published or forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, and The Collagist, among other journals. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Electric Lit, and TinHouse.com.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

3

F R O M T H E P R ESI D ENT

Creatures of reason, seekers of beauty Linda Ware wisconsin academy BOARD PRESIDENT Years ago, a student asked me at orientation what qualities he would need to be successful in my Freshman English class. The question was odd, but perhaps useful. I came up with three qualities. First was curiosity: a readiness to learn about things that haven’t interested you. Forget that you never liked chemistry or poetry. (And if you can’t feel curious, learn to fake it—develop a convincing “interested face.”) Second was civility: a capacity to hear challenging things and remain respectful. Education opens your mind, brings new information, and explores new ideas.

Sometimes that’s uncomfortable, but we behave well with each other. The final one was tenacity, of course—a persistent determination. No matter how hard this is, you’re going to give it a good try.

For me, curiosity is first. Always. Maybe it’s because I am ambidextrous—or ambisinistrous, as I used to joke about my handwriting on the blackboard—but I am fascinated with intersections between fields and the blurring of disciplinary lines.

As a student, I first majored in art, then psychology—thought about geology and theology—and, finally, English. Everything I was interested in could be found in literature (and it was better written). I began teaching Contemporary Literature at UW–Marathon County and met my husband. Rather than write my thesis, I married him, dear reader.

Here was another area of intersection. My husband Lane was a business lawyer, starting a practice from another place on the intellectual spectrum. Learning to fuse my teaching and community arts outreach with Lane’s business skills and civic commitment was a fascinating process. (When we got married, the university thought I’d gone Establishment, and the community thought he’d gone crazy. Probably they were both right.)

Still, I realized that my interest in interdisciplinary research seemed counterproductive to many. I wanted professionally to explore intersecting relationships between poetry and painting, or fiction and the visual artist; this exploration wasn’t always supported by the university. I was also riveted by etymology, where words come from and the metaphors they embody.

Our language was created from concrete comparisons. The word metaphor comes from Greek, meta, to change, and Old Norse, bear, to give birth to. Verse, the word for poetry, comes from the Latin word for the line or furrow the plow makes in the ground. The lines on a page look like furrows—verse and reverse.

Science constantly uses metaphors: the bed of a river, a piece of steel (Old High German for to stay), an electron (Greek for amber)—all of them from physical images.

And I wanted to look at crossovers among fields, especially in the arts. When I first read about fractals, I was so excited I e-mailed my kids (I’d never heard of the phenomenon). That a word from Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured” 4

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

describes repeating patterns in time and space and nature and art is a wonderful thing—everything from a pine cone to a lightning bolt has fractals.

I read recently that in the movie adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, it was not the director but the composer and the lyricist who imagined the change from black-and-white (life in Kansas) to color (life in Oz). How cool is that? I have tried to make these types of leaps and connections in my teaching, and my continuing research explores them as well.

Hence, my delight in the Wisconsin Academy. Not only does it encapsulate my interests, but it focuses increasingly on sharing connections statewide, creating partnerships, and building conversations. According to our mission statement, we are a crucial resource for people who believe that by “foster[ing] a rich and lively creative culture that enhances our quality of life …

Wisconsin [will be] thriving and resilient, economically, socially, and environmentally.”

But how do we arrive at this thriving, resilient place?

Because we have not all been “strangers in Egypt,” to use a Biblical metaphor, I believe that our growth and goodness as human beings depend upon transformative access to knowledge through science, to memory through history, and to metaphor through the arts. Whether the focus of our concern is education or immigration or equal rights, we need the imaginative life of stories and poems and paintings as much as we need the crystalline clarity of science and rational thought to inform our discussions—and decisions.

In Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, author and independent scholar Ellen Dissanayake argues that arts continue to exist in society today because play and ritual have always been essential to human adaptation and survival. We are Homo aestheticus, seekers of beauty, just as much as we are Homo sapiens, creatures of reason: “the arts [allow] us to differentiate the special from the mundane … to cope with unusual or inexplicable occurrences, and to gain a communal focus that enhances our ability to flourish and survive.” It’s this creative tension between beauty and reason that fuels our drive to “make things special” every day.

So what we do through the Academy is both extraordinary and at the same time very basic. Creating interdisciplinary programs and raising money to support these programs, bringing speakers and cultural events to people around the state, assessing our facilities and capabilities, even arguing at Board meetings— they’re all ways we “make things special” for ourselves and generations to come in Wisconsin. I’m excited at the prospect of doing more—and more meaningful—work of this sort over the next two years. I’m also honored to have been elected president by this extraordinary organization.

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

EDItor’s Notes

What’s the big idea?

Jason A. Smith Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker put forth his budget for the 2015–17 biennium, it arrived with some dramatic changes to the mission of the University of Wisconsin System. Particularly conspicuous were deletions to language central to the Wisconsin Idea, the guiding principle of the UW System “to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society.”

While the proposed changes to the UW System’s mission were walked back by a Walker administration spokesperson a few days after they were made public, debate over the UW budget continues as many students, faculty, and administrators as well as staff from related programs like Wisconsin Public Television and Radio prepare for inevitable cuts.

As a result of the “drafting error” to the budget that lead to the deletion of the Wisconsin Idea, millions of people now know about the Wisconsin Idea. Or do they?

Until the recent budget kerfuffle, I loosely understood the Wisconsin Idea as the guiding principle of the University of Wisconsin System, that great mass of knowledge and creativity that includes all state campuses as well as the two-year schools of the UW Colleges and UW Extension—about 40,000 faculty and staff and 180,000 students.

“I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state,” stated University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise in a 1904 speech, permanently affixing in our minds the guiding principle that a UW education is best used in service of the public.

Of course, the concept of the Wisconsin Idea didn’t spring fully formed from Van Hise. Rather, it was the product of much sifting and winnowing by Van Hise and contemporaries in both the university and the state legislature alike. Under Van Hise’s leadership (1903–1918), campus giants like John R. Commons, Thomas C. Chamberlin, Stephen Babcock, and Aldo Leopold regularly met with legislators and governors Robert La Follette and Francis McGovern. And it’s important to note that Van Hise, who was Wisconsin Academy president from 1894–1896, Thomas C. Chamberlin, who was Academy president from 1885–1887, and Academy members such as John R. Commons understood there were other vehicles—like the Wisconsin Academy—capable of delivering the promise of the Wisconsin Idea.

The Wisconsin Idea was during the early 20th century both guiding principle and a compact of sorts between the university and legislature, a way of ensuring that those who created policy were kept informed by and engaged with the most important research of the day. The function of this task often fell to Charles McCarthy and the newly formed Legislative Reference Bureau (for more on this, read McCarthy’s 1911 book The Wisconsin Idea).

While age and geographic proximity were two reasons for the cozy relationship between the UW and the state legislature, Jack Stark’s article “The Wisconsin Idea: The University’s Service to the State” (Wisconsin Blue Book, 1995–1996) outlines in particular the friendship between native Wisconsinites and UW classmates

6

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Charles Van Hise and Robert La Follette as instrumental in the forging of this compact.

“During their tenures in office, La Follette repeatedly sought Van Hise’s counsel and appointed him to several state boards,” notes Stark in his fine exploration of the genesis and far-reaching impact of the Wisconsin Idea. Stark goes so far as to say that La Follette deserves a substantial share of the credit for the Wisconsin Idea, citing his deep draw on the UW for expertise and advice as well as his establishment of the Legislative Reference Bureau (brilliantly run by McCarthy) as a way to keep this exchange of knowledge constant and effective.

During his term as Wisconsin governor, Robert La Follette (1901–1906) developed the techniques and ideas that made him a nationwide symbol of reform—and made the state an emblem of progressive experimentation. Forged through his friendship with Van Hise, the guiding principles behind La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea stated that efficient government required control of institutions by the voters rather than special interests, and that the involvement of experts in law, economics, and social and natural sciences would produce the most effective government.

The real expression of La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea came during the 1911–1913 legislative session under Governor Francis McGovern. As historian R. David Myers notes is his wonderful but brief article, “The Wisconsin Idea: Its National and International Significance,” (Wisconsin Academy Review, Fall 1991), “A La Follette disciple, … McGovern worked closely with [Charles] McCarthy to make his years as governor the apex of progressive reform and probably the years when the [Wisconsin] Idea enjoyed its greatest reputation. The role of the Idea and the concept of Wisconsin as the laboratory for democracy can be seen in the legislation passed during the first decade and one-half of the twentieth century. The direct primary, railroad regulation, consumer protection, public utility regulation, progressive income tax, life insurance regulation, minimum wage, child labor, and workers’ compensation legislation were among the most notable laws enacted.”

What is especially important about this suite of reforms is how it served as a model for many other states (some of which completely adopted the legislation). The model Wisconsin Idea legislation was so important that at times even the federal government adopted large parts of Wisconsin laws verbatim.

In this way, the Wisconsin Idea continues to play a role in the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens—whether they know it or not. Certainly support for the Wisconsin Idea today means one believes that education should enhance lives both in and out of the classroom. But support for the Wisconsin Idea is also an acknowledgment that government can and should harness the power of knowledge to improve the human condition.

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

UPFRONT

New Wisconsin Women Making History Website:

Their Stories—Our Legacy Opening in spring 2015, a new online project called Wisconsin Women Making History will share the stories and accomplishments of Wisconsin women who, for various reasons, are less known or acknowledged than they should be. Through video, photography, and other media, the Wisconsin Women Making History website provides students and lifelong learners a way to advocate, connect, and empower women, girls, and their allies across the state to celebrate the women who have transformed our state and lives for the better.

“Wisconsin women have historically stepped into leadership roles, worked to improve their communities, and [been] innovat[ors] in science, the arts, business and governance, yet their stories are often left untold,” says project coordinator Lynne Blinkenberg, who is also Wisconsin Public Television’s (WPT) director of community engagement. “Through [video and other media], the Wisconsin Women Making History website brings to life the stories of women and girls often overlooked in Wisconsin history.”

The Wisconsin Women Making History project emerged from a national, multiyear PBS/Independent Television Service (home of the Emmy-winning Independent Lens series) initiative called Women and Girls Lead, which explored through documentary film how women and girls—even when lacking equal opportunity—can become leaders in business, the arts, science, and politics.

So much good will was amassed around Women and Girls Lead, that project partners began pooling resources and sharing

Vel Phillips Vel Phillips has spent her life fighting for equality, and she has achieved many firsts during her more than ninety years in Wisconsin. In 1956, Phillips became the first woman elected to Milwaukee’s Common Council. She went on to become the first woman judge in Milwaukee County and, in 1971, the first African American to serve in Wisconsin’s judiciary. In 1978 Phillips became the first woman and first African American to be elected Secretary of State in Wisconsin. In retirement Phillips continues to work in pursuit of equality, and the Vel Phillips Foundation today helps to establish equality and opportunity for minorities through social justice, education, and equal housing and employment opportunities.

ideas in the hope of creating a new, searchable database that honored Wisconsin women history makers.

The Women’s Studies Consortium, in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, drew upon its multi-institutional educational network to bring together a statewide consulting committee of scholars, educators, and historians to review and recommend nominees. WPT, Wisconsin Public Radio, and the Wisconsin Humanities Council offered narratives from their vast collections of stories by and about Wisconsin women of note, and the Wisconsin Historical Society came up with a treasury of historic photos from their archives. The Wisconsin Educational Media Lab provided advice and support for how to best use the materials in classrooms. The Office of the UW System’s Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian worked on editing content, and will be the host for the website. With WPT in the lead, collaborating partners contributed the time of staff, student researchers, and interns toward developing content and designing the new website.

Blinkenberg says that, with new women being added regularly, the online Wisconsin Women Making History database is always evolving. Too, she notes Wisconsin schools and communities can also nominate their own history makers for consideration and help expand access to and information about the women who have made—and continue to make—our state great.

For more information about Wisconsin Women Making History, visit womeninwisconsin.org.

—Helen Klebesadel

Laurel Clark Born in 1961 and raised in Racine, young Laurel Clark was passionate about the environment and animals. After receiving her BS in Zoology and finishing medical school at UW–Madison, Clark became a medical officer for the US Navy, working in the challenging confines of ships and submarines. She became an Undersea Medical Officer and later a Flight Medical Officer. NASA soon took notice of her stellar work and, after completing two years of NASA training and evaluation, Clark was approved for flight assignment as a mission specialist the STS-107 flight of the space shuttle Columbia.

Even though Clark perished when the Columbia broke apart during re-entry, her spirit lives on today through various programs dedicated to protecting the environment and science education.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

7

UPFRONT

Science and Art Collaboration Explores

small problems, BIG TROUBLE the mix and have them make drawings of the tornado. This was tricky since the thing was like a living organism—it moved, rose, fell, dissipated, and would suddenly resurrect! It was a wonderful opportunity for the students to learn gestural drawing techniques and master the art of suggestion rather than focusing on the details required in a rendered drawing.”

Brey and Waller noticed that the tornado had a curious effect on bystanders who were simultaneously excited and agitated but pleasantly calm. They realized how very visceral this experience was, and began to form an idea for a broader public art installation that could capture this power and create awareness of—and stimulate action around—important scientific issues.

Over the next few years the two worked on Layers: Places in Peril, a series of large-scale paintings that explore how the fragile built environments in which we live can be dramatically altered by changes in the global climate. The two professors created an exhibition from the Layers project, which opened in 2012 at the

Photo credit: Judith Waller

It was a tornado that forged an almost twenty-year collaboration between Appleton-area artist Judith Waller and scientist James Brey. In 1993 Waller was a new Professor of Art at UW–Fox Valley with a burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Brey was a faculty colleague in the department of Geography and Geology.

After a few discussions, it became clear that Brey and Waller shared an interest in the ways in which science and art connect, an interest that bled into their similar style of instruction. Brey, for instance, would ask students to draw diagrams and other representations of the physical properties of materials his classes were exploring. He appreciated the close observation required to do a detailed drawing and the challenge of capturing the shape and size of object components and their relationship to the whole. Waller, on the other hand, was always on the lookout for patterns in both plant and mineral structures, from which she felt students could learn much about the natural world as well as art. Each began to bring students into the other’s lab.

Left: Earth scientist James Brey touches the tornado that began a twenty-year collaboration with artist Judith Waller.

Center: Composed in collaboration with UW–Fox Valley professor Teresa Weglarz for the small problems, BIG TROUBLE series, “Blue-Green Algae” alludes to the lipopolysaccharide compounds that may cause rashes, gastroenteritis, or respiratory symptoms in humans and animals.

Right: The small problems, BIG TROUBLE series features Waller’s rendition of the “Dust” studied by Steven Hoven, which is taken from core samples dug from ocean floors in order to track historic climatic shifts.

Outside of class, Brey and Waller began to “tutor” each other in art and earth sciences, all the while considering how a painting might tell an environmental story and how a carefully constructed bit of scientific prose could add to the mix. Waller began to create work from essays and ideas provided by Brey, and Brey would go to her studio to learn about artistic composition while discussing ways to make a painting or image more directly respond to a scientific finding or theory.

Then came the tornado. Not an actual tornado, but a large-scale model in Brey’s lab made of dry ice, hot plates with steaming pots of water, and lots of fans (on the floors, on tables, even suspended from the ceiling). Tiny houses from a Monopoly game were used for scale, as the seven foot tornado whirled with a palpable force.

“Jim really had to control the environment to make the perfect twister,” says Waller. “I would bring my drawing students into 8

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Aylward Gallery at UW–Fox Valley and was also displayed at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Museum in the fall of 2013. Of this groundbreaking series, Brey says that, “by looking scientifically at our layered world and depicting it in layered paintings, scientists and artists bring together academic elements that individually are interesting, but which together scream out for attention and understanding.”

Continuing their exploration of the intersections of science and art, the two began work on another series titled small problems, BIG TROUBLE, with an new exhibition of works set to open this spring at the Aylward Gallery. An extended collaboration with other scientists, small problems, BIG TROUBLE was developed to create awareness of subjects that are small in scale (e.g. soil, parasites, dust, viruses, micro pollutants, invasive species) yet can pose significant threats to human life.

UPFRONT

Each painting in the small problems, BIG TROUBLE series is oil and mixed media— which includes a reflective material such as gold or other metal leafing—on an 18-by-18-inch canvas. According to Waller, each painting provides a glimpse of a small problem linked in a chain of causality to “big trouble” for humans.

Many of the subjects have connections to or are emblematic of the changing climate. For instance, the image “Dust” reflects core samples dug from ocean floors in order to track historic climatic shifts and was composed in collaboration with geoscientist Steven Hoven from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Working with UW–Fox Valley associate professor of Biological Sciences Teresa Weglarz, Waller produced “Blue-Green Algae,” which invokes a common summertime threat to aquatic life.

“I incorporate some element that pertains to the idea of ‘reflection’—sometimes literal as in a mirror surface, or sometimes something more oblique like a shadow,” says Waller, noting how the “reflective elements point to the fact that these issues are [ones] we face today, and [our response to them] reflects back on us.

As in previous collaborations, Brey and Waller’s plans include an educational component: at UW–Fox Valley and at Appleton Area School District high schools, students will exhibit both an art piece and scientific text panel focusing on environmental issues. Brey and Waller hope students will use this opportunity to develop their own cross-disciplinary approaches to art and science and will also work to increase awareness of environmental issues.

Brey, who is currently director of the American Meteorological Society’s Education Program in Washington DC, says that while he reaches thousands of people through course work, text books, and other vehicles, his work with Waller is in some ways the most rewarding.

“Our collaborative projects reach a totally different audience: people wandering into a gallery and confronting some of these things for the first time,” he says. “I mean, wow! You get this visceral response to this learning, this informative strike. That’s the magic of our collaboration.”

—Jason A. Smith

Performing Arts Medicine Program Performing Artfully in Medicine Like a quarterback benched with a sprained ankle or a plumber laid up with a bad back, a performing artist faces more than just worry when an on-the-job injury keeps her from returning to work. Through a new program at the UW Hospital, singers, dancers, musicians, actors, and others for whom the stage is both office and canvas have a new partner in finding medical care tailored for their special requirements—and talents.

Spearheaded by Dr. Charles Ford, the new UW Health Performing Arts Medicine program connects musicians, actors, and dancers with doctors who are experienced in working with performers, and who know how to quickly get them back to work. Ford is an Emeritus Professor of Surgery in the Division of Otolaryngology at UW Hospital with over 25 years of experience treating artists and non-artists alike. Having served on the boards of performing arts groups such as Forward Theater Company, Madison Opera, and Madison Symphony Orchestra, Ford brings to the program a deep knowledge of the demands of performance art and an abiding love of the craft.

Through the UW Health Performing Arts Medicine program, patients receive medical treatment and physical therapy specific to their profession as well as advice on how to prevent injury. The program also offers access to specialists who help patients improve body mechanics, posture, diet, and mental wellness.

Shaped through insight gleaned from similar programs in New York and Chicago, the UW Health Performing Arts Medicine program introduces patients not only to world-class healthcare providers who, like Ford, are passionate about the arts, but also to integrative care that addresses the physical and psychological components of certain injuries.

For instance, after an initial consult, a dance student with a recurring sprain or fracture would be connected to experts at the UW Sports Medicine Dancers Clinic who understand the specific mechanics of dance. Likewise, a singer concerned with unusual hoarseness could run through scales and warm-ups with his doctor seated behind a piano. An actor with chronic stress due to the intense demands of rehearsals might learn about alternative treatments like massage therapy or mindfulness meditation provided by UW Health’s Integrative Medicine specialists.

While the UW Health Performing Arts Medicine program is still in its earliest stages, Ford says he expects to help more artists of all skill levels in the Wisconsin’s growing performing arts culture.

Amateur and professional performers in need of specialized care can learn what the UW Health Performing Arts Medicine has to offer at uwhealth.org/performingarts.

—Zachary Carlson W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

9

f e ll o w s f o rum

Walking in Wild Places Robin Chapman Wisconsin Academy Fellow since 2014

W

here do poems come from? Where do dreams come from, and artists’ ideas, and mathematical proofs, and inventors’ projects? The creative process has multiple sources, and often a protracted timeline, including times when it seems as if you’re

doing nothing at all.

“Incubation” is the label for this part of the process.

And part of being creative is trusting that something inside of you is keeping the project alive. Somewhere, there’s a solution, image, idea, phrase, or feeling gestating.

Different poets will have different sources for creativity, and, for many of us, poems often originate in place.

Mary Oliver has her Blackwater Pond that she visited so many mornings, slipping into the lives of the creatures and the sights there. In my daily life I have the path to Picnic Point near the UW–Madison campus and the prairies, rivers, and marshes of Wisconsin. And every winter I return to the Canadian Rocky Mountains of Banff in search of poems.

If place is a trusted source, wild places make the prospect of finding a poem even more variable—it can take ten years to stumble on all the elements needed; or the poem can arrive even as you run along the Picnic Point path.

Or you will remember a landscape.

Sometimes memory isn’t enough and you need to return to a place. Two of my poems about the same piece of land in Wisconsin’s Marquette County, written thirty years apart, visit and revisit a hillside remnant prairie and oak woods about two miles from naturalist John Muir’s boyhood home, a place where my first husband and our young children camped on weekends.

The first poem I carried with me for ten years in my pocket notebook as nothing more than the last two lines of a title. I walked the hill each summer, thinking that John Muir had lived nearby.

But I knew I needed more than this vague thought for a poem.

10

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

His autobiography of growing up there, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), gave me a sense of the young Muir’s hard life, and the sensation that I might be crossing a path he once walked looking for bees.

Still not enough.

I set myself to reading more books about Muir’s life and even paid a visit to the Wisconsin Historical Society in search of a device he created in 1862 while a student at the University of Wisconsin.

In his autobiography, Muir describes the “clockwork desk” he constructed in his dorm room to help with his studies. “I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term,” he writes, I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study.

Only when I had time for further reading about Muir’s life, and actually saw his incredible clockwork desk, did the poem come together and the first line of its title appear:

f e ll o w s f o rum

WISCONSIN HISTORY LESSON: JOHN MUIR ON A HILL IN MARQUETTE COUNTY John Muir walked across this hill when he was a boy.

Bones aching from digging out oak grubs or hollowing out the cramped damp well fifty, seventy, ninety feet down day after day until the neighbor noticed that no more buckets were coming up and hauled him out just before the oxygen gave out.

Head aching from his father’s grim message: You’re no good boy, no good unless you work; the only salvation from our evil nature is prayer and work; reading and education are the devil’s temptation.

Eyes aching from reading at three a.m., catapulted out of bed and sleep by a contraption of wooden scraps to the wooden desk that turned the pages like clockwork, twenty minutes a book.

It’s still on display At the Historical Society.

Years later, heart aching, he walked away from the education that wasn’t the answer; walked away from a Yosemite sawmill and a woman who wasn’t his; walked home to Wisconsin once when he imagined his mother dying.

But walked most of his life toward the High Sierras, Yosemite’s upper reaches, the Grand Canyon, toward the views that stunned the heart into forgiveness or forgetfulness and peace.

Talked Teddy Roosevelt into leaving all those views to the nation.

His own salvation foreshadowed in the aching boy seeking some ease, watching and walking through the Marquette County trees, the light shining in benediction through the leaves.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

11

f e ll o w s f o rum

I published this poem for the first time in the spring 1984 issue of Wisconsin Academy Review, well before the magazine became the Wisconsin People & Ideas we know today.

Thirty years after publication I thought back to the poem and the same sandy hill in Marquette County. Children had grown up, that marriage had ended, and we had, with a wrench, sold the land after many years of no longer visiting.

But in memory, our time there—fifteen years of camping in the same place—is clear; and I put some of it here: Mapping the Marquette County Hill On the forty acres of sandy hill, century-aged, remnant-sown, John Muir’s boyhood footprints crossed the sand blow, following bees, or so I like to think; though it might have been only the crest of the hill he crossed, through the oak, or the turkeyfoot and little bluestem ranks that wave there now. Small orchids, earthstars, goldenrod and blazing star were found in the sand blow, and under our shelter at the top of the hill our own sons dug in the dirt, hammered nails, grew to build their own skateboard ramp and hang in the sky like the hawk’s brief survey. And here’s the path I wandered with my field guide, learning names—ten new species flowering every week— here’s the place the hairy puccoon bloomed, there the pussytoe patch, the hawkweed acres; and here’s the place we put the bench, sightline into Wisconsin thunderstorms, moving opposite

to lower clouds, and here’s the east toward which the bluestems bowed; its coordinates include the firepit—marked “kitchen,” on our map, the path through the woods to the three-sided outhouse, the other path to back bedroom—Adirondack shelter where we slept to the insistent voices of the whippoorwills, the bark of fox and coyote.

Mark the fox—it had a den in the woods. And mark the whippoorwills—we saw one once on a limb, its legs so weak you could scarcely see them; and mark the trail where the ladies-slippers bloomed, past the outhouse. Mark the locust woods to the west, oak and hickory woods to north; question mark for where the owl lived, nightly questioning us. Here we found the webs of the writing and funnel spiders, and here the walking-stick. Say that this was the map of our days. Say that we too walked here once, if the barred owl asks you.

Of course, not all poems take decades to accumulate their component materials. And, in my experience, creativity in writing poetry requires a kind of double vision: a strong intention coupled with a receptiveness to not knowing.

Carrying a notebook and pencil. Even a title, an equation, a memory. Being present in loved places. Open to what comes. You too may find lines coming to you, walking our Wisconsin places—wild and otherwise. Z Postscript: “Mapping the Marquette County Hill” first appeared in The Cortland Review, Issue 60 (August 2013)

CONNECT: Nominate a Fellow 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/nominateafellow.

12

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

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.

111111

The Fine Art o

Children’s Book Illustra

11

The Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration will present the work of several of Wisconsin’s most accomplished illustrators of children’s books. The exhibition features work by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Laura Dronzek, Lois Ehlert, Renèe Graef, Kevin Henkes, David McLimans, and Ellen Raskin.

The James Watrous Gallery staff thanks the artists for their energy, and loan of artworks to this exhibition.

AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps AV I D TO Ps

Brochure-1.indd 5

1/19/09 3:36:37 PM

This exhibition is supported in part by the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation. Additional support comes from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts; by a grant from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission with additional funds from the American Girl’s Fund for Children, the Evjue Foundation, and the Overture Foundation; by Stephen & Melanie Watrous;

by William & Lynne Watrous Eich; by Tom Watrous & Suzanne McKegney; and by Bruce Jacobs. Ongoing support comes from DoubleTree Hotel-Madison and Robert & Carroll Heideman. The Wisconsin Academy thanks these sponsors for their generous support.

Childrens Postcard B.indd 1

listen understand inspire results

promotion through

web

print

email

608.257.1232

info@hustondesign.com

www.hustondesign.com

We also thank the Milwaukee Public Library and the Milwau Public Museum for loaning artwork, as well as the staff at t University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Cooperative Children’s B Center, especially Director Kathleen T. Horning and Director Ginny Moore Kruse, for their valuable insight and assistance would also like to thank Pat Dillon, Faith Miracle, and Phil H Professor Emeritus, Graphic Design, UW–Madison.

The James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of S Arts and Letters is devoted to Wisconsin artists, Wisconsin craft history, works owned by Wisconsin collectors, and exh that bridge the sciences, arts, and humanities. It is a progra Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, an indep nonprofit membership organization that connects people and from all areas of knowledge and all walks of life to advance and culture in our state.

essay

S S L A R G B E F I E R I ME NA G E

14

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

essay

B y P aul L u k as P h otos b y H e at h e r M c C ab e

It’s a crisp autumn day in the small town of Sparta, Wisconsin, and Darren Schauf is showing off the tools of his trade: around six hundred very large fiberglass molds strewn across a five-acre field. Most of the fiberglass molds are oversized versions of recognizable shapes—a horse here, a beer bottle there, assorted arms, legs, and faces all over the place. The molds are primarily a drab yellowish brown, and most are lying on their sides, making them look discarded or dead, almost like a post-war battle field from another time. Or planet.

Editor’s Note: A version of this essay originally appears in re:form, a publication of Medium.com.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

15

essay

But where some might see a big field of junk, Schauf sees the lifeblood of his business. “This is our agriculture section,” he says proudly, walking past a pile of fiberglass carapaces.

“Pigs, horses, cows. There’s Babe the Blue Ox, who goes with Paul Bunyan. Oh, look, you’re standing on Paul Bunyan’s ax!” he says, pointing down at a brown mold surrounded by long, green grass.

We’re strolling the grounds of FAST Corporation (the acronym stands for Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks), one of the country’s most intriguing and entertaining niche manufacturers. Schauf, the company’s general manager, and his crew use these molds to cast the large fiberglass statues that have become icons of roadside Americana. If you’ve ever seen a big steer perched atop a steakhouse, a giant soft-serve cone in front of an ice cream stand, or a Bob’s Big Boy statue, FAST probably made it.

FAST’s fiberglass sculptures are designed to withstand decades of weather and rigorous use with very little maintenance. So, it makes sense that the company also manufactures slides for water parks, a specialty branch that constitutes a surprising 40% of FAST’s overall business. Even more interesting is the occasional collaboration with an artist who needs a specialized manufacturer like FAST to execute a large-scale project.

Take for instance the thirty-foot eyeball FAST made for Chicago sculptor Tony Tasset in 2007. Working from a photograph of his own eye and in consultation with FAST designers, Tasset created the three-story sculpture with the intent of making “art that speaks to the biggest audience possible.”

Commissioned by the Chicago Loop Alliance for the 2010 Art

16

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Loop installation, Tasset’s three-story Eye currently resides in Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri.

FAST, which has two-dozen employees, produces close to 1,000 statues a year and typically has about fifty pieces in various stages of production at any given moment. Turnaround time ranges from six to ten weeks. About 10% of the company’s projects are custom jobs; the rest are stock designs from the FAST Corporation catalog, which is why all those molds are kept out in the field. If someone orders, say, a giant ear of corn, the appropriate mold will be brought in from the field and the piece will be cast in fiberglass. The molds are too big to put in storage, so they just sit there out in the open, which works out fine. It’s not as though anyone’s going to sneak off with a fifteen-foot-tall root beer mug.

We’ve all seen giant statues at some point—the world’s largest this, a colossal that. But what, exactly, is the appeal of the titanic? Part of it, to be sure, is the simple—if quintessentially American—truism that large things are impressive.

But there’s something else at work here. It’s one thing to be wowed by a very large mountain; it’s quite another to encounter a very large cow, or banana, or bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Of course we can’t change our own size. But by changing the size of these everyday items we change our relationship to them. There’s something in our brains that finds wonder and delight in this warped sense of scale (in case you haven’t guessed, it works with miniatures, too). This wonder and

essay

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

17

essay

18

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

essay

delight form the core of FAST’s commercial and popular appeal.

But while FAST’s fiberglass sculptures are large and attention-getting, the company itself is one of those enterprises that hover just under the radar. We all understand on an intuitive level that someone is making these giant, iconic pieces.

But very few of us have ever thought about who these someones might be.

FAST is the third incarnation of a Sparta-based company that began in the 1960s under the name Sculptured Advertising. A few sculptures from this era are still in use (including a steakhouse steer that was recently returned to FAST for repairs after having been hit by a car). The company then became known as Creative Display at some point in the mid1970s. In 1983, a designer and artist named Jerry Vettrus took over the operation and renamed it FAST Corporation. Many of the molds out in the field today were designed by Vettrus himself.

By 2000, Vettrus was looking to sell. “Jerry had grown the business to a certain point, but he was an artist,” says Schauf.

“He kind of ignored a lot of the aspects of running the business. He was more about sculpture and painting.” Vettrus ended up selling FAST to Schauf’s father, James, a former manufacturing executive. The younger Schauf, who’d been working for a market research firm down in Madison, came on board in 2007 and now runs FAST’s day-to-day operations, a job he clearly enjoys. “It’s a lot more fun to build a twentyfoot dog than to sit at a desk all day and then write a report,” he says.

And with that, he leads the way to a building where a FAST crew is working on, sure enough, a twenty-foot dog—a Dalmatian, to be precise. This is a complicated custom job, because each of the Dalmatian’s spots is actually a window that will be fitted with a light, which necessitated the creation of an internal armature to support the lighting system.

Most FAST products are much simpler than the dog.

Assuming the mold for a project doesn’t already exist out in the field, the process begins with the creation of a “plug” or model. Schauf points to one that’s currently being made for a two-scoop ice cream cone. “The only other double-scoop cone we have is the one we use for a chain called Andy’s Frozen Custard,” he explains. “Andy doesn’t technically have an exclusive on that design, but he’s a good customer, so I’m building a new double-scoop cone that we can market to other customers, and I won’t sell Andy’s to anyone else.”

We’ve all seen giant statues at some point—the world’s largest this, a colossal that. But what, exactly, is the appeal of the titanic? Part of it, to be sure, is the simple—if quintessentially American—truism that large things are impressive.

The new ice cream cone plug, like all FAST plugs, is made from expandable urethane foam. “It’s great stuff,” says Schauf.

“You spray it on and it expands to, like, ten times its size.

Then you cut it with a filet knife. If you cut off too much, you just spray on some more and do it over. We just use a photo for reference until it looks right.”

One challenge when sculpting the plug is to minimize undercuts or recessed areas, which will make the mold harder to

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

19

essay

remove from the plug. The more undercuts there are, the more pieces the mold will end up being. In the case of the twoscoop cone, Schauf says the resulting mold will probably end up being fifteen to twenty separate pieces.

Once a plug is finished, it’s painted with a releasing agent to make it slick. Then it’s coated with multiple layers of fiberglass to create the mold.

The mold is removed from the plug in several pieces, and the plug discarded (they’re not very recyclable, unfortunately, so they end up in the landfill), leaving behind a perfect negative image in which to cast a new sculpture following the same process used to create the mold.

After the sculpture is cast it is glued together, sanded, and hand painted by FAST artists. The mold joins the others out in the field. “We don’t throw any of them away,” says Schauf.

“Even if I think we’ll probably never use it again, we hold onto it.”

The economic downturn of recent years has had surprisingly little effect on FAST, in part because more people have been foregoing lavish vacations in favor of simple road trips

20

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

or “staycations” (in which families tour local attractions, usually via automobile), two factors that have increased the demand for roadside statuary. FAST has also benefited from the growth of agritourism, where the rising popularity of corn mazes, “pick your own pumpkin” patches, and so on has led to more orders from farmers looking to spruce up their properties with a giant chicken or an eight-foot pumpkin hut.

You’d think other players would want to get in on the action, but FAST appears to have the market largely to itself.

“We’re not a big company, but we’re the biggest in the industry,” says Schauf. “The other people who do what we do, working with fiberglass, are mostly ‘onesie, twosie’ types in a garage. There are lots of companies now doing 3-D CAD [computer aided design] cutting of EPS [expanded polystyrene] foam, which they’ll hard-coat with sprayed plastic. It looks really nice, but it’s extremely expensive for large pieces, so they can’t really compete with us for the big stuff.”

“Big stuff,” of course, is a relative notion. Up until now, FAST’s magnum opus has been the 143-foot walk-through muskie that forms the centerpiece of the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame & Museum, located about three hours north of Sparta in Hayward, Wisconsin. But the company recently

essay

Up until now, FAST’s magnum opus has been the 143-foot walk-through muskie that forms the centerpiece of the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame & Museum, located about three hours north of Sparta in Hayward, Wisconsin. began work on a project more than twice as large as the muskie: a 300-foot-wide eagle that will crown the Red Lake Indian Nation’s new capitol building in northern Minnesota.

“The wings will be attached to the building, and the head will be fully three-dimensional and will blend into the breastplate underneath it,” says Schauf, not without a touch of pride.

And when the eagle is done, the mold for it will presumably take its place out behind the fabrication building along with all the others. Although the distribution of the molds in the field

may seem random, there’s actually a bit of a system.“I don’t like to think of it as our cemetery or graveyard,” says Schauf.

“It’s our mold warehouse.” Then he adds, “Some people also call it the Sparta Zoo. … We have fish in one area, African animals in another, and so on.”

Indeed, the Sparta Zoo has become something of a tourist draw over the years, with curious visitors stopping by for a photo op with Paul Bunyan or Big Boy. The company doesn’t promote this type of thing, but doesn’t discourage it either; and guests are generally welcome to roam around as long as they don’t climb on the molds.

As small groups of people wander through this fiberglass menagerie, looking diminutive against the giant animals and oversized icons, I consider the full-circle element to FAST. Here’s a small company known for creating roadside attractions that has itself become a roadside attraction, an American cultural touch point that continually renews itself by creating more and more Americana.

This surreal loop of self-reference isn’t lost on Schauf. “I’ve definitely thought about that,” he says, strolling past a giant hamburger mold. “And there’s something very satisfying about it.” Z

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

21

PRofile

A Gift Given, a Gift Returned Kimberly Blaeser and the Revelatory Power of Poetry B y Eli z ab e t h W y c k off P h otos b y K e vi n J . M i y a z a k i

T

he news that Kimberly Blaeser would be Wisconsin’s new Poet Laureate could not have arrived at a more fitting occasion. On a cold November evening at Woodland Pattern Book Center in

Milwaukee, Blaeser had just finished reading aloud to a crowded (and very warm) room of friends and fellow poets. She had read works featured in a collaborative, interdisciplinary art installation called HYBRID: Transported

by Word and Image. Conceived by poet Sara Parrell and photographer Thomas Ferella as a way to get people thinking about the intersections of art, poetry, and ecological conservation—three of Blaeser’s favorite subjects—HYBRID features paired poems and photographs in Milwaukee- and Madison-area hybrid taxi cabs.

22

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

PRofile

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

23

PRofile

HYBRID poets Matt Rogge, Margaret Rozga, William Stobb, and Angie Trudell Vasquez read from their works while Ferrella discussed the origins of the project. Afterward, William Stobb, poet and chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, pulled Blaeser aside to convey the good news.

“I was flabbergasted,” she says, “because I didn’t expect it at that moment. I was very happy and kind of speechless.”

Luckily, Blaeser’s husband had the presence of mind to pull out a camera and snap a few candid photographs, which show Blaeser surrounded by beaming colleagues, students, and fellow poetry lovers—an apt celebratory scene for a lifechanging moment.

“It was a really lovely moment, because [Woodland Pattern] has been my ‘book home’ since I began working in Milwaukee,” she says, pointing out how the community center has hosted many of her poetry readings over the nearly twenty-five years that she has lived and taught in the area. Blaeser regularly schedules readings for her students there as well. “It’s been a place in the community that I’ve worked with for a long time,” she says.

“It was a great place to hear the news.”

The setting was also appropriate for Blaeser because the notion of hybridity plays a pivotal role in her work—specifically the fusion of visual art and literature. Her current creative project, a collection of “Picto-Poems,” places poetry and photography in thought-provoking combinations. The concept comes from Native American pictographs: art often found on rocks or canyon walls. One of Blaeser’s pictopoems, “Ephemeral Habitation at Cavate,” was recently published in the Milwaukee-based literary journal, Cream City Review, and is also featured in a new anthology called Mediating Indianness (Michigan State University Press, 2015). The poem is comprised of four layers of images: a canyon wall, the partially translucent phrase “Do Not Copy,” a framed photo of a young woman’s shadow, and finally the text of the poem, made more powerful by its arrangement amidst the interposed images.

“All of my work continues to have a grounding in the perspective of an Anishinaabe woman,” says Blaeser. “That is just who I am.”

But her poetry reaches far beyond traditional Native American themes. And Blaeser’s picto-poems are the newest additions to a sizable body of work that frequently conveys her fascination with natural environments. Water imagery often appears in her work. “A huge percentage of my childhood was spent on a boat at the lake or ice fishing,” she says, and animals often make appearances, too: from muskrats to crickets to

24

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

snowy egrets. These nature poems reflect a keen awareness of and belief in the interdependence of all living things, bearing witness to occurrences of ecological degradation while encouraging readers to take responsibility for their actions and initiate change.

Many of Blaeser’s poems explore issues of social as well as environmental justice. An enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she frequently writes about Native traditions and casts light on historical events involving indigenous people.

Poems about her Anishinaabe and German ancestors often look at the past with an intimate, almost confessional perspective. In her more spiritual poems, Blaeser considers life, death, and the search for transcendence. Always, though, her words convey the conviction that everything—people, animals, insects, trees, rocks, water—is a part of something larger.

“A lot of my work has to do with the natural world. Of course, if we think that the natural world needs to be protected, then ideas about how we are in the world and how we choose to live in relationship to the natural world are automatically involved in the politics of ecology,” she says, noting that “everything overlaps.”

Many of the principles that guide Blaeser’s poetry—her respect for nature, passion for social justice, and delight in language—were instilled in her as a child by family and friends living on the White Earth Reservation in remote northwestern Minnesota.

She describes the childhood home where she lived with her grandparents as the middle of nowhere.

“We didn’t have television,” she says. “We didn’t have a lot of the things that people entertain themselves with these days, so we had a lot of oral storytelling.”

Blaeser fondly recalls her mother reading to her before bedtime and her father reciting poems he had memorized, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” on long car trips. “My dad could recite poetry at the drop of a hat,” she says. “Both of my parents were very literate.

Despite the fact that neither of [them] were college educated and we lived in this remote, non-artsy place—an environment that didn’t necessarily support the arts in the way we think of them now—they felt the power of story and literature and passed it on.”

English is Blaeser’s first language, but the older relatives on her father’s side spoke German and her grandparents, aunts, and uncles on her mother’s side spoke Anishinaabemowin, the native language of the Anishinaabe people. Because she was exposed to more than one language at a young age, she was raised with an appreciation for the musicality of speech and

PRofile

inflection. “It was the love of language,” she says, “the power of language that I think was embedded in my character early on.”

Blaeser’s family and the community on the reservation helped her develop not only an appreciation for writing and storytelling, but a sense of self-confidence. “I really did start writing poetry almost as soon as I could write,” she explains.

“And I’m not saying it was any good! In fact, some of it was probably quite horrible. But all the way through my childhood, I was this shy little person, and that was one of my outlets. I was encouraged in my writing from the time I was small.”

Years later, thanks in part to this encouragement, Blaeser earned her undergraduate degree in English at College of St. Benedict in Minnesota and, after graduation, was hired as the first female reporter/photographer for The Thief River Falls Times in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. During this time, friends and family urged Blaeser to continue pursuing her writing by attending graduate school. (“Quite honestly, [at the time] I didn’t really know what that meant,” she admits.) A local librarian helped her look into programs, and her research led her to the University of Notre Dame, where she eventually earned master’s and doctoral degrees in English.

As a graduate student, Blaeser became involved with the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP), a grassroots organization founded by Winona LaDuke (an activist and fellow member of the White Earth Reservation) in 1989. The organization’s mission is to recover the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation and to protect and preserve indigenous traditions and community knowledge. In 1990, Blaeser began to receive recognition for her poetry when she joined LaDuke on a small fundraising tour for the WELRP. “It was the first time that I had actually performed my poetry in public,” she says. These readings resulted in an invitation for Blaeser to submit her work to a small journal, which eventually led to her first publication.

In 1992, with a few published poems under her belt, Blaeser was invited to the inaugural Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers and Storytellers in Norman, Oklahoma. This historic gathering of over three hundred Native writers was an unprecedented event. Not only did it demonstrate the strength of Native literature at that time, but it also connected many indigenous writers from across North America and put them directly in touch with one another. Blaeser maintains that the writers she met at the festival played a crucial role in inspiring her to pursue a career in poetry.

Shortly after Returning The Gift, Blaeser’s first collection of poetry, Trailing You (Greenfield Review Press, 1994), won the

Native Writers First Book Award. “I really want to give credit to all the Native writers,” she says. “Once I got into a community of writers, there was just a lot of support.”

And she feels this support has continued to be true in the community of writers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM), where she’s been teaching in the English Department since 1990. “My time at UWM has been filled with unexpected opportunities,” she says. “I have had tremendous support over the years and been given the flexibility to carve my own niche in the academy.”

It’s clear that Blaeser feels incredibly grateful for the amount of support she has received, and that she has taken the phrase “returning the gift” to heart. Early in her teaching career at UWM, Blaeser made a commitment to promoting the voices of marginalized poets through a multicultural writing group called Word Warriors. “It was a different era,” she explains, “and a number of young writers of color approached me saying that they didn’t feel like their work was understood, necessarily, or valued in the classroom. So, they asked if I would become the faculty advisor of their group.”

At first, Word Warriors mainly consisted of undergraduate writers, but later it was comprised of experienced graduate student writers.

Blaeser believes the group encouraged and validated countless young writers, and she considers Word Warriors a formative part of her growth as both a teacher and poet.

“I would not have believed in my work nor enjoyed writing nearly as much without my relationship with the many writers in Word Warriors,” she says. “Many have gone on to publish, to academic jobs, to wonderful careers. Being a part of this ‘family’ of writers, has been one of the important parts of my writing life in and around Milwaukee.”

On a national scale, Blaeser also helps to promote writers of color in her role on several advisory and editorial boards for Native American-focused literature series at academic presses.

She also recently initiated the Milwaukee Native American Literary Cooperative (MNALC), which, with additional help from poet Jim Stevens and others, brought 75 Native American writers to Milwaukee for the Twentieth Anniversary Returning the Gift Festival in 2012. Drawing support from UWM, Woodland Pattern, Marquette University, Milwaukee Area Technical College, and the Indian Community School, MNALC is still going strong today.

Blaeser has helped to shine a light on marginalized voices in her roles as teacher, advisor, and editor. But, of course, she draws attention to Native people, issues, and traditions through her own poetry as well.

Blaeser fondly recalls her mother reading to her

before bedtime and her

father reciting poems he

had memorized, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,”

on long car trips. “My dad could recite poetry at the drop of a hat,” she says.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

25

PRofile

“Early [in my career],” she explains, “part of my compulsion was to maybe correct some mis-tellings of history or to give a perspective that hadn’t been represented appropriately.” In addition to countering stereotypes, she has found it equally important to honor her Anishinaabe relatives and community by simply telling their stories. “These people are not wellrepresented and their stories aren’t known,” she says. “I have such strong feelings for the importance of my culture and my community, I [want] to somehow serve.”

Blaeser believes that her connection with Wisconsin is rooted in a spiritual engagement with place. Whether ice fishing or boating on a lake, watching sandhill cranes and beaver, or listening to loons, she finds that being in nature is healing and brings her joy. “It’s like purging myself of the chaos,” she says. “We write because the world reveals itself. And the world reveals itself partly through the search in language for meaning or understanding or beauty.”

She recalls one autumn afternoon several years ago when she felt transported by the beauty of the trees’ colors. “I think I’m still part of that ecstatic tradition in poetry,” she says, “because I am transported by the leaving of my own ego. Just for a little bit, you’re entering into another place, and in that other place, you’re nothing. You’re on the fringes of something so enormous and there’s the possibility of these little moments of revelation.”

Blaeser aims to share the revelatory power of poetry with as many Wisconsinites as possible. As the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for the next two years, she will have an opportunity to develop a special project that highlights poetry in a public way.

Blaeser said she would “like to bring poetry into more public spaces and events—to unusual places like the Horicon Marsh

Bird Festival, to baseball games, flower shows, or sushi bars.”

She’s hopeful that a radio program featuring Wisconsin poets and poetry events will launch soon, and she’s planning a largescale poetry recitation event in April 2014. Blaeser also intends to put her past editing experiences to work on an anthology of Wisconsin writers.

“The poetry of our state continually astonishes me,” she notes, adding that “to be selected as Wisconsin’s ambassador for poetry is truly a gift.”

This concept of the giving and receiving of gifts is fundamental to Blaeser’s way of being in the world. She considers the Poet Laureate position not only an honor, but also an incredible opportunity to pass on the encouragement and inspiration that she’s received over the years to an even broader audience.

“There are people everywhere who carry poems around, for whom poetry means something,” she says. “Why is it that poetry means so much to us and how does it? Why does it matter enough that we store it and carry it around with us?

That [poems] become maybe mantras?” Blaeser looks forward to exploring these questions as Poet Laureate.

She admits that she’s been surprised by how quickly her calendar has filled with scheduled appearances since the announcement. But to her, the demand for her time as Poet Laureate is also an excellent reminder of the many places where poetry readings and other poetry-based events occur across Wisconsin—at libraries, schools, and retirement centers, to name just a few.

“I always knew that poetry was important and working out there in the world,” she says, “but it’s lovely to see that more concretely, to see all of the places that poetry is at work.” Z

CONNECT: Learn more about the Wisconsin Poet Laureate In May of 2011 the Wisconsin Academy announced their stewardship of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate program to ensure its survival and support the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission after the Wisconsin Department of Administration eliminated state support for the program.

The state’s leading voice for poetry, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate is charged with promoting poetry and the literary arts through publication, performance, education, workshops, and online resources, and sharing the values of poetry, creativity, and artistic expression across the state.

The current Wisconsin Poet Laureate is Kimberly Blaeser.

26

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Under the Wisconsin Academy’s stewardship, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate and Commission continue to serve Wisconsin. Today, the Poet Laureate program is supported by the work of volunteer Commission members, individual donations, and the support of member organizations: • Council of Wisconsin Writers • Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters • Wisconsin Arts Board • Wisconsin Center for the Book • Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets • Wisconsin Humanities Council For more information on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate program, or to request an appearance by current laureate Kimberly Blaeser, visit the new Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission website at wisconsinpoetlaureate.org.

{ Poetry } Seasonal: Blue Winter, Kirkenes Fire* December snow falls fumbling through great drafts of memory piling once more upon the backs of the hunched and soundless old women.

Such age we cannot hold in the wrinkled leather purses of our eyes in the black hollow of empty mouths.

Yet faintly we hear time soughing in the darkening winter sky pine ancient, winter song of sleep echoing still in a callused crust— this ceremonial remembrance: Terra cognita, terra incognita.

Terra cognita, terra incognita.

We are born to know this moment of elation: sun the fire that rises over the ice white tundra of arctic winter.

Each year our lives revolve as first earth turns its face from the burning orb of sun, and we in simple desperation light the crackling signal fire hold to its flames our icicle bodies our feet the drum, stamping the rhythm of renewal calling sweet holy transformation.

Terra cognita, terra incognita.

There is a place in the distance where the wintering land and the cloud heavy sky meet at the horizon of all knowing.

What we know in darkness we may forget in daylight, and so cold may come upon our hungry souls like a ritual, medicine passage to rebirth.

There is a lonely moment when they become indistinguishable dusk and day blending one into another until the division between land and sky falls away

This year and next and each to follow transport us with every recited memory instruct us in reverence for the bright warm gifts of sun and fire.

and we stand surrounded by the blue white world bereft of every common marker suspended somewhere between vision and reality lost, snow blind tumbling into a dimension beyond where feet may stand on these frozen border lands.

Terra cognita, terra incognita.

Then it is we wake chanting through endless painted patterns of the dusk in the time and timelessness of what once were days cut loose now from all equilibrium.

So soul rest comes upon the Nordic land and upon its ancient reindeer people.

The tired water sleeps as ice and we glide upon its hardened body and slowly turn the earth with our prayers.

Then riding the accumulated vibrations of voice, following the steam sign of our winter breath, the warm globe of light returns.

Each year we stand on the brink to ignite with the torch of our tongue’s song that which is withheld that which strokes our longing our hardened forgetful souls Terra cognita, terra incognita.

Now the dark veil is lifted we shed each inky fear and walk as one to hail the source: Oh sun, oh fire Tundra flower of the winter night!

Open the red flames of your petals, Waken this eternal drama of emergence— death to life, dark to light, ice to fire.

Now enlighten us with all that is known.

Now enlighten us with all that is unknown.

Terra cognita, terra incognita.

We turn and face this burning truth— Infinity in the darkened eyes of night, Infinity in the flaming belly of fire.

—Kimberly Blaeser *Kirkenes is a small city in the arctic region of Norway.

GALLERIA

GALLERIA

WATERWAYS B Y J od y C low e s

Y

ou can draw a lake or paint the ocean, film a rainstorm or a blizzard, sculpt the contours of a river’s path. But how can you express the essence of water?

It’s slippery.

Definitions of water mostly describe what it isn’t: colorless, odorless, tasteless,

transparent. In more positive terms, one can think of water as a dynamic substance in constant flux, responsive to the slightest vibration. It’s a shape-shifter, taking the form of any cavity, flowing around obstacles, seeping into crevices and soaking into pores. Water is a solvent, a transmitter of energy, and the very medium of life. It’s hard to imagine a more daunting subject for an artist.

Waterways, an exhibition on view at the James Watrous Gallery this spring, features work by John Miller, Sarah FitzSimons, and Marsha McDonald that investigates the essential nature of water. Through research and patient observation, these three Wisconsin artists have dedicated themselves to understanding the messages conveyed by waves, ripples, and still waters, the deep edges of rivers, and the pull of the tide. In each case, this quixotic pursuit has been repaid in work that is powerful yet poignant, grounded in research as well as a profound respect for the limits of our understanding.

Opposite page: John Miller, Across the Cove, 2014. Four-color screenprint, image size 21.75 x 16.5 inches.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

29

GALLERIA

30

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

Above: John Miller, Up River from Ferry Bluff, 2014. Inkjet print, 11 x 15.75 inches Opposite Page: (clockwise, beginning with upper left) John Miller, Near Shore II, 2015; Bird Forms, 2014; Near Shore I, 2014; Ripples, 2014. All works: Four-color screenprint, image size 21.75 x 16.5 inches.

John Miller has spent countless hours on the water as a paddler, learning to read the meaning of each riffle and eddy on its surface. As a painter and printmaker, Miller is known for lush landscapes that foreground the rivers and lakes he loves best. His most recent screenprints dramatically narrow the field of vision, zooming in to focus on individual ripples and waves. Composed with strong, calligraphic lines and brilliantly colored, each image isolates and clarifies a specific watery motion. They’re exquisite, as graphically powerful as any of Miller’s previous work. But to an experienced boatsman, Miller’s prints also plumb the depth of the water, the action of the wind, and the obstacles beneath the surface. Like a boater’s lexicon, they codify the gestures of the water’s surface and illustrate how one might “read” the challenges ahead. One can imagine them as teaching tools, extravagantly beautiful flash cards for novices on the water.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

31

GALLERIA

32

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

Sarah FitzSimons’ art practice is driven by her fascination with oceans and geomorphology. In the past, she’s made films and sculptures directly on the ocean’s shore, often playing up the contrast between the waves’ constant motion and the solid geometric forms of houses, tents, or bedsteads. Her more recent work looks directly at the geology of the ocean floor, taking the colloquial ocean “bed” literally by stitching a quilt that represents the Pacific. Gradations in the fabric’s colors mark changes in depth, sewn lines delineate the ocean’s currents, and the bound edges follow the meandering shape of its coasts. Trying to pin down an ocean in fabric is a curious endeavor—and the project’s titanic scale means it may take years to complete—but even FitzSimons’ smaller mock-ups express her profoundly tender image of the ocean as a comforter, gently laid across the land’s sleeping contours. FitzSimons is also casting a series of wave forms in hard, white ceramic. Set out in rows, they have the unsentimental clarity of a scientific diagram. Their chilly mien contrasts starkly with the quilt’s warmth.

Above: Sarah FitzSimons, Small Porcelain Waves (before glazing), 2013. Porcelain.

Opposite page: (clockwise, beginning with upper left) One of Sarah FitzSimons’ unfired “Small Waves,” 2013. Sketch for Wave as an Object, 2011. Pacific Quilt (in progress), 2013.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

33

GALLERIA

34

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

Above: Marsha McDonald, river rapids #2, 2015. Acrylic and ink on clayboard, 36 x 60 inches (one of two).

Opposite page: Marsha McDonald, 36 film beads, 2014. Still images from 36 films of the Milwaukee River.

Marsha McDonald has trained her painter’s eye on moving water for many years, capturing waves and waterfalls in canvases that appear abstract at first glance. In her pictures, dense layers of color mirror the water’s depth and transparency and bold splashes of paint catch the rushing flow of its falls and sprays. While McDonald’s images of water may seem non-specific, her titles often refer to a particular body of water, and each work reflects her relationship with a certain river or stream. Over the past several years she has lived within sight of the Milwaukee River, and her daily observation of its waters has the quality of a devotional act. McDonald has recently ventured into video, filming the river in different seasons and times of day. By masking these video clips, she has created a series of simple, circular images of moving water. She calls these “film beads,” and watching them in succession feels surprisingly similar to passing prayer beads through one’s fingers. They reflect the paradox of water’s nature: repetitive yet ever-changing.

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

35

GALLERIA

Above: Marsha McDonald, (one of) 1000 canoes, 2014. Paper, acrylic paint, copper leaf, thread, 1.5 x 8 x 2 inches each

In America, we take abundant, clean water for granted. Until drought strikes or a local well is contaminated, it’s easy to forget how fundamental water is to our lives. While the efforts of scientists, managers, and policy makers focus on research, engineering solutions, and legislation to protect our waters, artists like Miller, FitzSimons, and McDonald take a different approach. Through close, deliberate observation, they cultivate an intimate relationship with water, exploring its poetry as well as its physicality. Their artwork inspires us to renew our primal connection with water, to remember the untempered joy of splashing and wading and quenching deep thirst. Quietly, yet insistently, it urges us to give thanks, offer respect, and, perhaps, take an active part in stewarding this most essential resource. Z

CONNECT: At the James Watrous Gallery On view March 10–May 10, 2015 Waterways features three Wisconsin artists—Sarah FitzSimons (Madison), Marsha McDonald (Milwaukee), and John Miller (Madison)—whose work across various media investigates the essential nature of water.

John Miller, an avid boatsman known for his watery landscapes, is developing a visual lexicon of water’s movements that is both calligraphic and intensely realistic. Marsha McDonald is a painter, photographer, and filmmaker whose oeuvre takes a contemplative approach to the study of water. Sarah FitzSimons makes quilts, drawings, objects, installation art, and short films that investigate how water shapes the land.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more information and related events.

36

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

W isc o nsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

Photo credit: Elizabeth Funk-Smith

READ WISCONSIN Days after the fall 2014 issue of the magazine was mailed, I received a message on my work phone from our former literary editor John Lehman. In the message, John said he had a problem with my characterization of certain aspects of Read Wisconsin as "failures."

"All we were trying to do [when we began in 2010], was find a way of bringing more attention to Wisconsin writers and poets," he said. "So, if we in any way got more people to read or consider Wisconsin literature on a more frequent basis, then we did what we set out to do."

Of course, in my mind (which belongs to an admitted overachiever) we haven't done enough in the magazine to support our writers and poets. And as I watch my daughter Violet (above), who is not yet two and unable to read on her own, find comfort and joy in sitting down with a good book (in this case, How Spider Saved Christmas), I wonder what else we can do to ensure that Wisconsin writers will influence her ideas and life as she grows.

Even though I grew up in rural farmland between Wild Rose and Waupaca (a place now well known through the autobiographical works of Jerry Apps), my education in contemporary Wisconsin fiction really didn't come until I began editing this magazine back in 2008.

Over the years I learned of the rugged lives and lands of the Driftless region through David Rhodes and the hardscrabble times of Superior dockworkers through Anthony Bukoski. Jane Hamilton and Nickolas Butler elevated to the monumental the daily intrigues of life in small town Wisconsin, while Dwight Allen and Chloe Krug Benjamin showed me a fictionalized Madison that is at turns humorous and foreboding. Even nonfiction stalwarts like Michael Perry and Jerry Apps (he's everywhere!) use the genre to explore and, in some cases, lampoon life in Wisconsin. And these are only a handful of marvelous fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and authors of books for children that are creating works that speak to the Wisconsin experience.

The bottom line is: I want to do everything I can to help Violet—as well as other young people and readers of this magazine—understand the rich literary heritage of which we are a part. In doing so, I hope to cultivate a love of our culture and a sense that we share something special, something larger than the present moment. If I succeed, perhaps she and others will believe that one can write books (or make jewelry, or sing, or dance), make a living doing with they love, and thrive in a state that appreciates the creative work of its people.

—Jason A. Smith

TURN THE PAGE FOR NEW FICTIION FROM STURGEON BAY WRITER (AND GENERAL SURGEON) SHAUN MELARVIE

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

37

Swimming to Saba

By Shaun Melarvie

T

he seagull glides over me, surprisingly clear and large, onyx eyes looking down, black-tipped wings outstretched, its fractured shivering shape a reflection in the water—except that I’m

looking at it from the other side.

Oh, I’ve had fantasies of drowning myself, long ago. But that fantasy involved a much more elective stepping away from shore. “Swimming to Saba” is how I thought of it. We were on vacation in St. Martin, and I knew that Saba was some miles off the southern shore. I told her I was going for a walk. I’d always wanted to go to Saba. It looked beautiful in the pictures: rounded, emerald mounds rising from water so clear it looked like they were floating above the white sand bottom, each a miniature paradise for one—or two.

I stood in the surf, under a starry sky of strangely shifted constellations, the surge breaking on the shore, the water and foam hissing and advancing

Before I went under, I had looked up towards the trail head—one thousand feet above—and appreciated the symmetry of having looked down on this very spot of variegated blue a few hours earlier. I float face up just beneath the surface, tired of life’s effort, mild diaphragmatic contractions reminding me of the need for air.

The current envelopes me in its inconsiderate grasp and pushes me, tumbling and rolling across the sandy bottom that drops away and I’m flying over the edge of something with my arms and legs outspread like I’m in control; but I’m not, and then its soft pressure pushes me down into the dark blue.

38

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

up the beach in an undulating line only to recede, tickling the bottoms of my feet as the sand eroded underneath. I looked across the water towards the Saba I couldn’t see but knew was there.

In my fantasy I swam until I could no more. It was quite peaceful, really, and, I tried, so it wasn’t a sin when I let the air from my lungs and the waves closed overhead.

The truth is: I’ve always been a sinker.

We found it by accident; Pololu Valley, a name on the map at the end of a road that was so out of the way and isolated that we figured it must be something

Photo credit: Richie Diesterheft/Flickr.com

read WI

read WI

{ Book Reviews } special. On windy, overcast days the sea is a blanket of noise and white with foam from the mouth of the inlet to the shore. But this day was perfect, like the day we first saw it together, an expansive polychromatic blue, broken only by roughly parallel lines of surf coalescing onto a black sand beach so far below and distant that it seemed a picture not meant for corporeal occupation.

The trail was as I remembered it: signs warning of a dangerous shore break and strong currents, a rock and dirt path twisting down between the branches of adjacent hau trees—fifty years an eye blink. I turn my head back, “Ready, Baybee?” I said in a low, private voice even though it’s 6:00 am—the start of the outgoing tide— and we’re alone. The narrow gap in the trees swallowed us and the gravity of the slope, seemingly just beyond the angle of repose, moved us forward with a peristaltic fervor. The first time, our descent was a sensual exercise of resistance and stress of supple muscled forms against a backdrop of a jewel-blue ocean. The trail’s sharp switchbacks and shear drop-offs were of no great concern; this time, it is a torturous test of a poorly functioning carbon-based life form of no great capability or promise.

Wide enough for two or more abreast in most places, the trail shrank to single file in others. Sometimes there were edges and surfaces of rock wearing through the hard-packed dirt; but the roots kept everything in place, a tangled presence surrounding the rocks and breaking through the earth in irregular clumps and swirls, taking up so much space that the ground felt hollow, so that at times it was like I walked on the surface of a drum.

I focused carefully on my foot placement, each step a tentative advancement along the trail, and actually saw the light beneath the root laying parallel to the ground as my foot slipped neatly underneath, a perfect fit, almost like it rose out of the hillside just for me. I was already moving

The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac

by John Hildebrand Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 200 pages $22.95

Reviewed by Elizabeth Wyckoff How do we define the Midwest? Do we identify the region by lines on a map, environmental features, or the shared values of residents? John Hildebrand believes the heart of the Midwest can be found in even smaller details. “Time and place might be the coordinates, the latitude and longitude, by which we chart our position in the world,” he writes, “but things are what we remember.” With humor and admiration, Hildebrand focuses on these things—the “solid, physical detail around which the intangible clings”— to conjure a sense of the Midwest in his newest collection of essays: The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac.

Most of the fifty-two short, powerful essays that compose this almanac first appeared in Hildebrand’s regular column in Wisconsin Trails magazine. Organized by month, the book charts a year of life in the Midwest: from church suppers, canoe trips, football games, and parades to run-ins with skunks, walleye, and Dobson flies. Hildebrand also reflects on his personal history, investigating the notion of home and the capriciousness of memory.

A native Wisconsinite, Hildebrand now teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, and his essays are educational without feeling like lectures. He delves into the history of legendary Midwestern figures like Aldo Leopold, and seasons his text with quotes from authors and poets like John Fowles, Henry David Thoreau, and Katherine Anne Porter. Though his knowledge of the Midwest seems encyclopedic at times, he readily admits his own areas of ignorance. Many essays feature Hildebrand’s friends—ornithologists, evolutionary psychologists, geographers, and tax assessors, to name a few— who provide perspectives that fill in the gaps. The curious, wide-eyed, and occasionally self-deprecating tone of these essays demonstrates Hildebrand’s humility and enthusiasm to know the region more deeply.

Some of the most enjoyable aspects of The Heart of Things are Hildebrand’s poetic turns of phrase. He observes the surface of a river being “cut by a V-shaped wave whose tip is a retriever returning a stick to the man who threw it from shore.” A ripe summer moon floating above a cornfield reminds him of a lesser-known Edvard Munch painting. He even lends a certain beauty to grim scenes of predation, like the weasel he describes with “a limp mouse dangl[ing] from its mouth like a bit of gray scarf.”

Occasionally, and perhaps not surprisingly, Hildebrand sounds a little like a Luddite. He blames the Internet for the dearth of small talk in his faculty coffee room, doesn’t trust electronic navigation systems, and argues that continue

W i s c o n s i n

reading

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

39

read WI forward, unable to resist the insistent pull of the slope. My ankle twisted inwards, coming loose before my tibia broke away from the plate and fifteen screws already there. Somehow, I managed to only fall to my knee and was able to get up and continue on, the throbbing burn a too ungentle reminder of my mortality—and of the first time I met her: a pretty girl behind a cashier counter in a printed tan smock.

Her name tag says, Rachel. She smiles at me, a perfect stranger. “Hi.” “You work here?” I instantly feel stupid. There’s a slight hitch in time, and I imagine the second hand of a giant clock going tick, tock.

“What gives you that idea?” She laughs. My face turns red.

“I do too. I mean … I used to. I mean I still do, it’s just that I twisted my ankle a couple of weeks ago.” I hold up my crutches a little higher just to make sure she didn’t miss them. “But I’ll be back next week.”

“Does it hurt bad?” She sounds like she actually cares. The ache in my left ankle noticeably lessens.

“Cried like a baby,” says David, my best friend, who I forgot was next to me, “just stepped off a curb carrying a case of Pabst. Next thing you know, he’s rolling around on the ground, grabbing his ankle and screaming like a girl.” He jabs me with his elbow, laughing, smiles at Rachel and charitably adds, “Doesn’t take pain too well.”

I shrug and look away, “Yeah. Pretty stupid, huh? See ya around.” I turn and crutch walk to the service counter to pick up my paycheck.

The burning in my ankle had faded to a tolerable presence as I passed the sign on a wooden post at the side of the trail that said, “Congratulations, you’re halfway there.”

From down the trail I heard voices, which puzzled me as I didn’t remember any other cars parked at the trail head.

The voices rounded a switchback below me, two people side by side with strong sure steps made possible by the two generations of separation between them and me. I stood off to the side,

40

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

not sure if he even saw me; but she did, her hair of the same color of long ago.

As she looked up at me with blue eyes and smiled, time stopped and I was in a place where I’m young and—she walks into the kitchen where I’m studying. It’s late, and I look up from my chemistry notes. “Are you okay, sweetie?” I stand up and pull out a chair but she doesn’t sit down and I see that she’s wearing her shoes.

The trail was as I remembered it: signs warning of a dangerous shore break and strong currents, a rock and dirt path twisting down between the branches of adjacent hau trees—fifty years an eye blink.

“I think it’s time. Finally. I’m sick of this.” Her hands are clasped under her belly like the weight of our child is too much for her back to bear alone.

“I know. I know, sweetie.” I feel completely helpless, like I should be doing something but knowing not what.

“Should I get the kids ready?” I ask.

“No. It’s late, and I don’t think I’ll deliver for a few hours.” The overhead light accentuates the shadows under her eyes and I have an urge to lay her down and tuck covers under her chin.

“The contractions are still at least twenty minutes apart.” She says it clinically, detached, as though she’s talking about somebody else.

“How long?”

&

I D E A S

“Over the past hour or so.” She walks to the row of wall hooks behind the door and grabs her jacket. “I’m going to drive myself. I’ll call you when it gets closer.”

“I don’t know, Baby, I’d feel better if I drove you.” I’m confused and can’t believe that I didn’t think this through better. “Let me get the kids and I’ll see if I can drop them at my aunts.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Michael, it’s not my first time. I’m telling you that it’s going to be a few hours at least and the longer we stand here talking about it, that much closer it’s going to be.”

“Okay.” I help her into the car. The seat is all the way back and as I click in the lap belt I see a sliding movement under the fabric of her blouse, stretched tight across the swell of her tummy and it’s like my heart flips over in my chest. Jesus Christ, I murmur. I can’t believe I’m letting her go.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Love you.”

And then she was gone.

The kids and I make it to the hospital a half-an-hour before our youngest is born. I have Samuel watch his little sister and littler brother in the waiting room because my aunt didn’t want to leave her dogs alone; and because she didn’t really have places for the kids to sleep she said from behind the halfopened door of her apartment, running a tentative hand across the four pink rollers evenly spaced, front-to-back, on the top of her head.

I’m writing a newsletter about gardening and soil pH in my home office when the phone rings. I hear her answer, and then I hear her say, “Yes,” and her voice sounds strange. Then a terrible sound I’ve not heard before surrounds me, squeezing my heart with fingers of fear. I know someone has died. I rush into the room, crying for I know not who, and she is standing there with her mouth open and a primeval keening coming out, like light escaping from a fracture in a sealed vessel—forever gone, forever lessened, forever changed. We bury our second child three days later.

In the trees I wasn’t sure if it was sun or cloud overhead. I wasn’t sure if it

read WI

{ Book Reviews } was rain on my face, or tears. I heard her soft voice ask me if I was okay and I realized that I hadn’t moved. She stood before me and her face was wet, too, and I thought that it must have been raining. I told her that I was fine, that she reminded me of someone, and then I turned and started again for the bottom just as her partner came around the switchback.

I stopped by the rope swing hanging from an ironwood tree at the bottom of the trail. It too was as I remembered it.

Her toes pointing out, back arched, hair hanging down, she looks backwards at me from the apogee of her arc, laughing. I hear the creak of rope on bark overhead and smell the faint scent of her perfume, flowers and citrus and sea all at once as I push her forward and up, again and again, not wanting the day to end.

I heard the creak of the rope on bark overhead, the worn driftwood plank passing back and forth, causing a gentle current in the air that tickled the hairs on my leg, unaware that I’d even pushed it. Not much further now, the low roar of the surf is close. Through the trees, I saw the blue, and her—impossibly blue eyes open a final time. “Remember Polulu Valley,” she whispers.

“Yes, honey. I remember.” I hold her hand. It is cool and dry. She smiles, her head sinking back into the pillow and as her gaze slips away and she closes her eyes. I know that she is there. We are alone, in our bedroom in our home with pictures of our children on the walls.

It is late—early morning, and I have a window opened even though it is cold out. I lean over to kiss her but have trouble finding her lips because I can’t see through the fog of tears hot against my face.

There was a rock for me to sit and take off my shoes. The coarse black sand felt cool against my feet, each step a perfect fit. I took the ashes from my backpack and walked into the foaming water. Voluminous clouds of postcard perfection moved leisurely across the sky. The warmth of the morning sun, already well above the horizon, was

fishing has become “a branch of applied electronics.” But these lamentations aren’t exactly nostalgia for the way things used to be. Hildebrand is careful not to glorify the past as a better, simpler time. In the first few pages of the book, he explains his attempt “to be celebratory without falling into the trap of local color where picturesque natives inhabit the Land Time Forgot.” It comes as a relief that he doesn’t portray the Midwest as one big Lake Wobegone.

Where The Heart of Things could easily veer into sentimentality, Hildebrand brings his prose back down to earth. In one essay, as he sits at a gathering of old family and friends, Hildebrand thinks: “Every face within the campfire’s glow belongs to someone I’ve known the better part of my life. I’d tell them how much they mean to me except it would spoil the mood, so I crack another beer instead.” Emotional and restrained, humorous and solemn, open-minded and opinionated, this book is as complex and charming as the Midwest itself.

The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County: A Novel

by Jerry Apps Terrace Books, 269 pages $26.95

Reviewed by Joan Sanstadt In his sixth novel, The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County, Jerry Apps explores the contentious issue of frac sand mining.

Earlier novels have highlighted land conservation, land use, food safety, and livestock siting. Apps is careful not to take a stand on these controversial issues; instead he uses his characters to portray the variety of ways in which people look at a specific situation or entry point that gets them involved in a particular issue.

Fine grained and developed through geologic processes unique to western Wisconsin, frac sand is used for hydraulic fracture mining of oil and gas—a process commonly known as fracking. For a novel, The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County offers a lot of information about hydraulic fracturing. While fracking is not being done in Wisconsin, the state’s special sand is very much in demand in the states where it is taking place. While an economic boon to some, the rapid development of frac sand mines throughout Wisconsin has caused many people to question whether or not the mining process is good for the environment or safe for the people living around the mines.

The people that inhabit his novels will be familiar to many Wisconsinites.

Apps has often mentioned during his many book talks that the characters in his novels are actually a composite of people he has known throughout his life.

The setting for each of his novels is the fictional Ames County, Wisconsin. But do not expect to find it, or his fictional village of Link Lake, on a map. continue

W i s c o n s i n

reading

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

41

read WI marred only by a gentle offshore breeze and the scattered drops of ocean spray, lifted from the wave crests by the wind, against my skin.

When the water was at mid-thigh, I opened the plastic container that the funeral home had given me. I had told them that I didn’t want anything fancy or heavy, that I wanted something more portable. I held it above the swells that were coming in at waist level. I wanted to be far enough out for the surge to take her.

I heard the wave break against the shore behind me, and as I felt its pull against the back of my legs I poured the ashes into the water. They were white and pale grey, and then they were around me and I felt their brittle granular texture against my skin, like thousands of tiny bubbles. I didn’t notice the wave that lifted me off my feet, and before I could stand up I felt

the undertow pulling me out. I didn’t have the container any more but I saw tiny diamonds of light in the water around me, against me. She felt close. I wasn’t afraid.

I discover that the key to drowning is to not have any expectation of ever again taking air into your lungs.

I am surrounded by blue and my only sensation of orientation is a vague lighter blue that must be up. I hear the mournful cries of whales calling. I miss her. I open my mouth and with the air held in my lungs I fill the water with my own sound, the sound of my fracturing, my memory of her, the whole of us, a lifetime. I take the first tentative sniff of ocean into my nose, trickling around the back of my throat, crawling down my trachea. It feels cool and illicit

as it passes into my bronchi. But in my chest it is heavy, and there is not the expected relief I thought its mere volume might bring. And then I am frantic, not yet ready to go.

Somebody is pulling me out of the water. My chest is on fire. I cough and retch like I’m trying to turn my lungs inside out. I can’t get enough air. I have no idea of how I got from there to here, an old man with a long scar on the inside of his left ankle stretched out on a black sand beach.

The coughing stops. I can breathe better now. I see the verdant mountains of Pololu Valley in the periphery of my left eye and the polychromatic blue of the ocean in my right; the sky, a cerulean vault over me. My nostrils are filled with the scent of salt and sea and flowers, and I feel her beside me, around me. I know she’s there—it feels like light entering through the break. Z

arts & minds ISTHMUS OF MADISON

Smart, original, timely content in print and online covering news, politics, food, drink, music, theater, movies, shopping, sports and more, all integral to life in the capital region. Isthmus emphasizes journalistic excellence, award-winning writing and high-quality design, along with a sharply honed, curatorial instinct for local happenings, and the best guides in town.

ALL YOURS, ALWAYS FREE

Isthmus u 101 King Street u Madison WI 53703 u 608.251.5627 web

TheDailyPage.com u mobile m.Isthmus.com

facebook

Isthmus u twitter @isthmusTDP

read WI New & RECENT Releases

FEBRUARY 2015 Blue Men and River Monsters: Folklore of the North

by John Zimm Wisconsin Historical Society Press

MARCH 2015 The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove

by Paul Zimmer The Permanent Press Crossing the Driftless: A Canoe Trip through a Midwestern Landscape

by Lynne Diebel University of Wisconsin Press Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini Dutton The Crops Look Good: News from a Midwestern Family Farm

by Sara DeLuca Minnesota Historical Society Press

APRIL 2015 Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories

by Jennifer Morales University of Wisconsin Press Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent (The History of Print and Digital Culture)

by James L. Baughman, et. al.

University of Wisconsin Press Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist's Memoir

by Jerry Apps Wisconsin Historical Society Press

May 2015 The Jesus Cow: A Novel

by Michael Perry Harper

{ Book Reviews } When the Alstage Mining Company proposes a frac sand mine in the village of Link Lake, events quickly escalate to a crisis. Business leader Marilyn Jones of the Link Lake Economic Development Council heads the pro-mine forces, citing needed jobs and income for the county. Some citizens are skeptical of the mine, and Link Lake Historical Society members outright object to the proposed mine location in the community park, where a huge and ancient Bur oak—the historic Trail Marker Oak—has stood since it pointed the way along an old Menominee Trail.

Something like the Trail Marker Oak, of course, can be a taken-for-granted site or building whose value is not realized until its existence is threatened. Apps artfully weaves the importance of a local historical society, the imagery of the village’s Trail Marker Oak, the need for economic development in rural areas, and a cast of interesting characters into a compelling plot that provides perspective on the knotty issue of frac sand mining.

Nationally syndicated environmental writer Stony Field is the pen name of Ambrose Adler, a retired farmer living just outside Link Lake. While his readers don’t know it, Field is a recluse who walks into town when the need arises. He also has special skills that he uses to communicate with his pets, a dog and a raccoon. The characterization of Field is one of the book’s many delights.

Every village or community has someone who is called upon to act as the local historian. Emily Higgins, president of the Link Lake Historical Society, is the standard bearer for Apps’ fictional town. This is an important task, as Apps noted during a book talk, “When a community loses its history, it loses its soul.”

There are people who are eager to latch on to whatever is new. In this book, Marilyn Jones of the Link Lake Economic Development Council leads the pro-mine group because she understands the county’s need for more jobs and income. But, as the reader learns, Jones has not done all of her homework.

Apps has said one of the reasons he writes novels is “to get people talking about things they haven’t thought about before and to think for themselves.”

Two old farmers, Fred and Oscar, who enjoy meeting for coffee at the Eat Well Café, are the voices of Everyman in Apps' book. At a book talk, Apps described their observations on what is going on in the community as “both informed and uninformed,” reflecting what many of us could say of ourselves (if we were honest) when weighing in on important issues like frac sand mining.

Apps has a good perspective from which to make pointed observations on the issues that affect Wisconsin’s rural communities. Born and raised on a farm in Waushara County, Apps is a former agricultural agent for UW Extension, a professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. His many nonfiction books include The Quiet Season, Barns of Wisconsin, and One-Room Country Schools.

Apps is also working on a third, hour-long documentary with Wisconsin Public Television. Z

Beneath the Bonfire: Stories

by Nickolas Butler Thomas Dunne 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.

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

43

read WI NEW

Wisconsin poetry

Home Again, Home Again The children are back, the children are back— They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack; The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad, Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad. The city apartment is leaky and cold, The landlord lascivious, greedy and old— The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted, The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.

Milk from Sleepy Cows (for Willi)

The company caved, the boss went broke, The job and the love-affair, all up in smoke.

The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock— O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.

And so they return with their piles of possessions, Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions, Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens, Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.

Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother Don’t say a word, but they look at each other As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.

The children are back. The children are back.

—Marilyn Taylor

here my son today is done the cows have all come home drink this milk fresh warm and silk it’s milk from sleepy cows drowsy cows now close their eyes to dream the orange sun down night night cows cream black and white come ’round from blue green hillsides warm and dreamy smooth and creamy milk from sleepy cows rest well yourself the world will somehow swirl without you for a while

1950 at night my mother bathed me in a white tub scrubbed me with white soap rubbed me in a white towel hugged and plugged me into pajamas and the white sheets

sleep now deep now not a peep now shush boy hush —Bruce Dethlefsen

an act so kind so common it barely even happened —Bruce Dethlefsen

44

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

read WI Along the Brule

White Stallions

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank

you would sit and watch its flowing.

—Kahlil Gibran

the children of the street must see themselves in the greasy puddles of the forenoon in the sundown storefront windows in the luster of the shoes they shine

Now I can watch the river.

Now, from this melting oxbow where I sit with my senses steeping in the sun, I am witness to the torrent, but not yet of it.

Soon my perspective will be different.

I will be running with the groundwater from grave to creek to roaring channel where, among sticks and gravel, I will wash downstream with the other detritus— remnants of what once was leaf, garden, gardener— past the still-invisible piers and posts of the next generation and the next and next whose silver bridges will one day arch, shimmering, over the strange blue boats of the remote unborn.

must see themselves in the reflection of a customer’s sunglasses in the tears of the old women in the shadow of the bus the children of the street must see themselves flying purple kites on sunny beaches dining with the family after church riding white stallions the children of the street must see themselves —Bruce Dethlefsen

—Marilyn Taylor

A Highly Caloric Lament A pox upon you, Charlie’s Chili Dogs, Starbucks, Chipotle, Coldstone Creamery, you harpies of the dreaded calorie— quit hitting on me till my judgment fogs, and every vein and capillary clogs with drippings from your latest recipe!

Arugula? Not for the likes of me, and neither are those dreadful diet blogs.

Been there, done that—gave all my sweets away, ate naked salad, kept the flab at bay.

But nowadays my magnitude increases.

I’m getting tubby. Fatter by the day.

Just look at me: mine aft has gang agley, my life’s in shreds; my mind’s in Reese’s Pieces.

—Marilyn Taylor

Credits: Marilyn Taylor's "Home Again, Home Again" and "A Highly Caloric Lament" first appeared in Going Wrong (Parallel Press, 2009); "Along the Brule" first appeared in Verse Wisconsin. Bruce Dethlefsen's poems are from Unexpected Shiny Things (Cowfeather Press, 2011).

ABOUT THE POETS

Bruce Dethlefsen was the 2011–2012 Wisconsin Poet Laureate. A retired educator and public library director living in Westfield, Dethlefsen has served as the secretary for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dethlefsen’s most recent poetry collection is Small Talk (Little Eagle Press, 2014).

Marilyn Taylor was the 2009–2010 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and Poet Laureate of Milwaukee from 2004 to 2006. Her award-winning work has appeared in a number of poetry journals and anthologies, and she is the author of six collections of poetry, including Subject to Change (David Robert Books, 2004) which was nominated for the Poets Prize, and the chapbook Going Wrong (Parallel Press, 2009). For fifteen years Taylor served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at UW–Milwaukee, where she taught poetry and poetics for the Department of English. She is currently on the board of directors for the Council for Wisconsin Writers and can be found leading poetry workshops locally, statewide, and beyond.

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i n t e r

2 0 1 5

45

C O N VE NT IONA L

D Ig ITA L

LA r gE FOrmAT

WE b E NA bLE D sOLuT IONs

FuLFILLmE NT

offering customers an unlimited array of customized print communication solutions

mA ILINg

55 0 Eas t Veron a Av e nue Vero na, WI 53593 T O LL-FR EE

8 66 ❙ 8 45 ❙ 6505

LO C A L

6 08 ❙ 8 45 ❙ 6505

FA X

6 08 ❙ 8 45 ❙ 8011

parkp rintin g. c om

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

of sciences, arts & letters

inspiring discovery

illuminating creative work

fostering civil dialogue

Connecting Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world.

Annual Report 2013–2014

wisconsin academy

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

PROGRAMS AND PUBLICATIONS FOR A SMARTER, BETTER WISCONSIN The Wisconsin Academy is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on the important issues and ideas of today in Wisconsin. We do this through programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.

Since 1870, the Wisconsin Academy has been a trusted resource for people who believe that critical thinking, meaningful arts and culture, and a clean, healthy environment are essential to life in Wisconsin. Today more than ever, Wisconsin needs thinkers and dreamers who want to work side-by-side to sustain these values we share—and the land we call home. By providing a forum to talk about and explore the issues and ideas of today we hope to cultivate a rich and lively creative culture that enhances our quality of life so that Wisconsin is economically, socially, and environmentally resilient.

Below you will find a few brief notes featuring highlights from our 2013–2014 season of programs and publications.

These notes are but a glimpse of the transformative work we are doing across the state, brief points of light we hope will help guide people toward a smarter, better Wisconsin.

Wisconsin People & Ideas

Photo credit: John Nelson

This year we celebrated sixty years of a magazine published specifically to keep people informed about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin today. Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from our visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters.

Telling Wisconsin Stories

In 2014 we featured interviews with Shotgun Lovesongs author Nickolas Butler (Eau Claire) and Wisconsin entrepreneurs such as Sonya Newenhouse (Viroqua) and Dorothy & John Priske (Fall River) who are leaders in environmental sustainability; reports on the growing hypoxic "dead zone" in the waters of Green Bay; photo essays by emerging artists like Lois Bielefeld (Milwaukee) and Jason Vaughn (Madison); previews of James Watrous Gallery exhibitions and profiles of exhibiting artists; new fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers from across the state, book reviews of current Wisconsin titles, and much more.

James Watrous Gallery

Photo credit: Mary Hark

A great place to explore and learn about contemporary art from Wisconsin, the Watrous Gallery shares the work of Wisconsin artists past and present and investigates ideas at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters. Increasingly, many Watrous Gallery exhibitions and events are connecting with themes explored through Wisconsin Academy Talks and Initiatives and in the pages of Wisconsin People & Ideas.

ShoWCasing Our Creativity

This season, the Watrous Gallery produced six stunning and thought-provoking exhibitions featuring work from eighteen visual artists from around Wisconsin. Several of our gallery and Academy Talks illuminated art’s power to evoke emotion and describe the human condition. For the April Academy Talk Camp Home, photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki and historian Jasmine Alinder discussed the WWII Japanese internment camps before a standing-roomonly crowd. Several audience members were inspired to share personal stories about life in the camps, offering a profound and unexpected experience for both the presenters and the audience.

Photo credit: Amanda E. Shilling

WISCONSIN ACADEMy TALKS Academy Talks bring people together to meet leading Wisconsin thinkers and share knowledge across disciplines in the effort to create a better, smarter Wisconsin. Academy Talks share the best of Wisconsin thought and culture while informing and entertaining audiences of all ages.

We record many Talks in partnership with Wisconsin Public Television (and other media partners) and make them available on our website and on air through WPT's University Place.

IDENTIFYING The Best Ideas

Over the last year audiences learned about the astonishing research and breakthroughs at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that allows us to “see” extraterrestrial sub-atomic particles zapping through the Earth. We discovered the creative process of celebrated Wisconsin artist, David Lenz. We discussed how changes in the climate are affecting our Wisconsin way of life.

Most importantly, we gathered together with leading Wisconsin thinkers and shared knowledge across disciplines in the effort to create a better, smarter Wisconsin.

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

WISCONSIN ACADEMy INITIATIVES Wisconsin Academy Initiatives convene Wisconsin leaders from an array of fields for deliberation, analysis, and distillation to identify strategies and solutions for a sustainable world. Our two current Initiatives focus on

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

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

Initiatives are the Wisconsin Academy’s expression of the Wisconsin Idea, and a reflection of a 145-year commitment to “gathering, sharing, and acting upon knowledge in sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin.“ Two years ago we initiated a statewide conversation about Wisconsin’s energy use in the face of rapidly changing climate. Since then we have taken substantive steps to move the conversation forward by convening people from an array of fields to talk, to listen, to learn, to question, and to challenge each other to identify strategies and solutions for a sustainable world. In 2014, we created a publication central to these strategies and solutions—Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future. We also began work on Communicating About Water: A Wisconsin Toolkit, a guide for message development to facilitate effective conversations about water, which augments our ongoing examination of fresh water resources in Wisconsin. Both publications are available for download at wisconsinacademy.org/initiatives.

FINDING INNOVATIVE Solutions

WisCONSIN ACADEMY FELLOWS The highest level of recognition conferred by the Wisconsin Academy, the Fellows award acknowledges an extraordinary 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.

We are pleased to have lasting relationships with many of our Fellows—the connection doesn’t end after the ceremony. Throughout 2013–2014 many Fellows participated as speakers and writers in our programs and publications: Steve Ackerman, Jerry Apps, R. Alta Charo, Richard Davidson, Laura Kiessling, Melvin R. Laird, David Lenz, and Tom Uttech.You can see all our Fellows, including our class of 2014, in the Fellows section of this report.

Celebrating Leadership

OTHER POSITIVE ENDEAVORS

SHARING POETRY AND THE ARTS

The Wisconsin Academy plays additional roles in Wisconsin culture and life through historic and recent partnerships with organizations that share our values and vision for Wisconsin: • Cultural Coalition of Wisconsin: Formed in 1993 as a means to share best practices and ideas, the Coalition works to advance the state’s culture, arts, humanities, and history. Members include: Wisconsin Academy, Wisconsin Public Television/Radio, Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Humanities Council, Wisconsin Arts Board, and others.

• Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies: Since 2012, we have partnered with the Nelson Institute at UW–Madison for the annual Jordahl Public Lands Lecture, named in honor of the late Wisconsin conservation leader Harold “Bud” Jordahl.

• Wisconsin Regional Arts Program: Since 2013, the Wisconsin Academy has hosted WRAP exhibits in the Steenbock Gallery, located in the Academy’s Steenbock Center in Madison.

• Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Awards: Founded in 2002 by Wisconsin Visual Artists, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and the Wisconsin Academy, the WVAAA annually honor individuals and organizations that have contributed to the wealth of artistic creativity in our state and region.

• Natural Areas Preservation Council: In 1951, the Wisconsin state legislature established the advisory Natural Areas Preservation Council. The Council is comprised of eleven members with backgrounds in conservation biology, botany, zoology, ecology, and geology. The Wisconsin Academy is responsible for appointing three of the eleven members every third year.

MAKING A BETTER WISCONSIN

Photo credit: Eric Miller/UW–Green Bay

This year, the Poet Laureate Commission entered its third year of stewardship by the Wisconsin Academy. Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland was very busy during the last year of his twoyear engagement as Wisconsin Poet Laureate making on the average one appearance per week.

Visiting every corner of the state (and putting over 14,000 miles on his car), Garland has presented to audiences that range from 5 to 650 people. Garland’s commitment to poetry—and the arts in general—fuels his desire to share his time and craft. Wisconsin Academy staff and members appreciate his contributions.

Photo credits: Amanda E. Shilling

WISCONSIN POET LAUREATE

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

A NOte from the President My term as President of the Wisconsin Academy Board came to an end at midnight December 31, 2014.

I want to reflect a bit on my time as President and on what I have learned while serving in this office.

I have loved being President of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. The name of our organization is a mouthful, and it sounds a bit old-fashioned. The Board has often speculated about “rebranding” the Academy—that is, finding a new moniker more resonant with the times.

But it seems to me that there is something courageous and magnificent about our ponderous name.

The sciences, arts, and letters are supposed to be divided by a great cultural rift. The sciences especially are supposed to be in a separate cultural realm from the letters and arts. But somehow the founders of this organization decided that it should encompass human aspiration as a whole, recognizing that all of us in our own ways are trying to figure out how the world works and what it means.

I like that, and I think the Academy, true to its name, aspires to use all the tools at its disposal—arts, letters, and science—to make sense of the puzzling reality in which we live. That’s what all of us have to do to live satisfying lives. A life of science without art, for example—or art without science—would be decidedly incomplete.

So what have I learned as President? I can tell you from my own experience over the past two years that this is an organization that will reward your increased participation. The Academy is a complex organization; its programs are diverse and ambitious. I have attended as many Academy programs as I could, including lectures, art exhibits, meetings on our environmental initiatives, and celebrations of literature and music. I have eagerly read our dazzling magazine. I have both liked and (sometimes) shared postings on our Facebook page. Thanks to our bountiful website, I have been able to view videos of presentations that I couldn’t attend.

My message to Academy members and donors (and fellow Board members) is this: Check our calendar often. Be aware of the rich menu of rewarding events and art exhibitions that the Wisconsin Academy offers to you. Read our magazines and reports.

Get involved. Participate in person when you can and by electronic connection when you can’t. Volunteer to help in programs that especially appeal to your personal interests. Give us your financial support.

There is no organization in the state of Wisconsin that is quite like the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Our endeavor is to connect Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world—an endeavor needs and deserves your support. What could be a more satisfying endeavor than one in which your participation yields a better world?

Millard Susman, President, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Professor Emeritus, Genetics Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison

WISCONSIN ACADEMy STAFF & Board (as of June 30, 2014) We are fortunate to have a talented staff and Board. The governing body of the Wisconsin Academy, our Board (formerly Council) sets policy and participates in strategic planning and implementation of the Wisconsin Academy's mission. Board members also identify resources and community partners to help the Wisconsin Academy grow and expand statewide programming.

STAFF Jane Elder executive director Randall Berndt, assistant curator, James Watrous Gallery Jody Clowes exhibition manager, James Watrous Gallery Meg Domroese Wisconsin Initiatives Program coordinator Aaron Fai project coordinator Martha Glowacki director, James Watrous Gallery Elysse Lindell outreach and data coordinator Don Meyer business and operations manager Amanda E. Shilling director of development Jason A. Smith director of communications and editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas

OFFICERS OF THE BOARD President Millard Susman, Madison President-Elect Vacant* Immediate-past President: James W. Perry, Larsen Treasurer Diane Nienow, Middleton Secretary James W. Perry, Larsen Vice President for Sciences Richard Burgess, Madison Vice President for Arts Marianne Lubar, Milwaukee Vice President for Letters Linda Ware, Wausau Foundation President Jack Kussmaul, Woodman *Linda Ware was named President-elect in July 2014

BOARD-AT-LARGE Leslie D. Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Mark Bradley, Wausau Patricia Brady, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Art Harrington, Milwaukee Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Jesse Ishikawa, Madison Tim Riley, La Crosse Tim Size, Sauk City Marty Wood, Eau Claire

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

WISCONSIN ACADEMY 2013–2014 Year-End Financial Statement Fiscal year 2014 R evenues

Foundation Board

Fiscal year ending June 30, 2014

The Wisconsin Academy Foundation is a separate nonprofit organization dedicated to managing the Wisconsin Academy's endowment. Managed by the Foundation Board, the Foundation provides the Academy with a steady source of income, which in recent years represents approximately one third of total funds for Academy operations. If you want to help to ensure this income stream to the Academy by including a gift in your estate plans. Please contact Amanda E. Shilling, director of development, at 608-263-1692 x16.

Contributions 36% Academy Foundation Distributions 34% Grants 19% Membership Dues 4% Donated Services 3% Miscellaneous 3% Events 1%

Fiscal year 2014 E xpenses Fiscal year ending June 30, 2014

Wisconsin Arts Administration Development & Membership Wisconsin Initiatives Wisconsin Reads & Writes Academy Evenings & Fellows Program Development

24% 19% 16% 16% 14% 7% 4%

Statement of Activity

Statement of Financial Position

Fiscal year ending June 30, 2014

as of June 30, 2014

Revenue Contributions................................................$ 270,495 Academy Foundation Distributions................ 250,949 Grants............................................................ 141,669 Membership Dues.......................................... 28,401 Donated Services............................................ 24,256 Miscellaneous................................................ 22,775 Events............................................................ 11,141

Assets Cash and cash equivalents........................... $ Pledges receivable.........................................

Certificates of deposit – restricted.................

Fixed assets, net.............................................

Other assets...................................................

Total Revenue...............................................$ 749,686

Liabilities Line of credit.................................................$ Accounts Payable...........................................

Unearned revenue..........................................

Other liabilities...............................................

Expenses Wisconsin Arts..............................................$ 170,759 Administration............................................... 140,275 Development & Membership.......................... 118,342 Wisconsin Initiatives...................................... 114,384 Wisconsin Reads & Writes.............................. 99,183 Academy Evenings & Fellows......................... 52,556 Program Development................................... 28,414

*Ex officio

93,801 32,500 13,203 97,339 6,168

Total Assets...................................................$ 243,011 0 6,694 10,551 16,540

Total Liabilities............................................... 33,785 Total Net Assets............................................. 209,226 Total Liabilities and Net Assets.....................$ 243,011

Net assets – Beginning of year......................$ 69,977 Net assets – End of year...............................$ 142,897

This is a summarized financial presentation. Complete audited financial statements are available upon request.

Auditors: Wipfli

Foundation Officers President: Jack Kussmaul Vice president: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Foundation Directors Marian Bolz Greg Dombrowski Jane Elder* Terry Haller Douglas J. Hoerr James W. Perry* Millard Susman*

Total Expenses..............................................$ 723,913 Change in net assets.....................................$ 72,920

Founder Ira Baldwin (1895-1999)

About this Report The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is an independent 501(c)(3) dedicated to connecting Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world.

In an effort to provide transparency and context for our operations, the Wisconsin Academy publishes an annual report. For a full version of our 2013–2014 annual report, visit wisconsinacademy. org/2014report.

For more information on our programs and publications, visit wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692.

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

OUR WISCONSIN WISCONSIN ACADEMY FELLOWSACADEMY FELLOWS 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.

Fellows have a career marked by a 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. Our current Fellows are listed below with the year of their induction.

Shirley S. Abrahamson (1982) Chief Justice, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Madison

Robert H. Dott, Jr. (2011) Professor emeritus of geology, UW–Madison

Steven Ackerman (2011) Professor and director, Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, UW–Madison

William F. Dove (2009) Professor emeritus of oncology and medical genetics, UW–Madison

Julius Adler (1996) Professor of biochemistry and genetics, UW–Madison

Ian Duncan (2009) Professor of neurology, UW–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine

Jerry Apps (2012) Author and historian, Madison

Judy Faulkner (2011) Founder of Epic Systems, Verona

George Archibald (1988) Co–founder and director, International Crane Foundation, Baraboo

Jean Feraca (2012) Poet, author, and journalist, Madison

Emily Auerbach (2006) Professor of English, UW–Madison

Michael Fiore (2004) Physician and smoking cessation researcher, UW–Madison

Alfred Bader (1986) Art collector and former chairman, Aldrich Chemical Company, Milwaukee

Kathy Kelsey Foley (2014) Director, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau

Tino Balio (2012) Professor emeritus, Communication Arts and founder of the Wisconsn Film Festival, UW–Madison

David Frank (2014) Director emeritus, American Players Theatre, Spring Green

Karen Johnson Boyd (2003) Arts executive and gallery owner, Racine

Janine Geske (2008) Professor, Marquette University Law School and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Milwaukee

Nancy Ekholm Burkert (1986) Literary illustrator, East Orleans, Massachusetts Molly Carnes (2006) Physician and professor of medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison

Raymond Gloeckler (2002) Wood engraving artist and Art Department professor emeritus, UW–Madison

Sean Carroll (2008) Professor of molecular biology and genetics, UW–Madison

John Gurda (2009) Author, historian, and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ferne Caulker (1990) Choreographer, director of Ko–Thi Dance Company, Milwaukee

Jo Handelsman (2009) Professor of bacteriology and co– director of the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute, UW–Madison

Robin Chapman (2014) Poet and professor emerita of communicative disorders, UW–Madison

Cynthia Haq (2012) Medical educator and doctor, UW–Madison

R. Alta Charo (2005) Biomedical ethicist, UW Law School, Madison

John Harmon (2005) Composer, pianist, and educator, Winneconne

Warrington Colescott (1988) Artist and printmaker, emeritus professor of art, UW–Madison

Paul G. Hayes (1986) Former Milwaukee Journal reporter, Cedarburg

William Cronon (2006) Professor of history, UW–Madison Richard Davidson (2004) Neuroscientist and psychologist, UW– Madison, and director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

Sister Esther Heffernan (2002) Professor emerita of social science, Edgewood College, Madison Molly Jahn (2012) plant geneticist and former dean, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, UW–Madison Geneva Johnson (1994) Former president and chief executive officer, Family Service America, Inc., Milwaukee

Richard Davis (2004) Bass player and professor of music, UW–Madison

James R. Johnson (1985) Former Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing executive, River Falls

Hector DeLuca (2002) Professor emeritus and former chair, Department of Biochemistry, UW–Madison

Laura Kiessling (2008) Hilldale Professor of Chemistry and Laurens Anderson Professor of Biochemistry, UW–Madison

John DeMain (2006) Music director and conductor, Madison Symphony Orchestra

Anne Kingsbury (2005) Mixed media artist and manager Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee

Michael Dombeck (2008) UW System Fellow and professor of global conservation, UW–Stevens Point

Joanne Kluessendorf (2005) Museum director and professor, UW–Fox Valley

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT Ruth DeYoung Kohler (1989) Director, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan

Sister Joel Read (1985) Former president, Alverno College, Milwaukee

Ellen Kort (2004) Poet and first Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Appleton

Don Reitz (1986)* Former professor of art education, UW–Madison

Melvin R. Laird (2003) Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Fort Myers, Florida

Pradeep Rohatgi (2014) Materials engineer, UW–Milwaukee

Jim Latimer (2012) Musician and conductor, Capitol City Band, Madison

Walter Sava (2006) Executive director emeritus, Latino Arts and United Community Center, Milwaukee

Maury Laws (2011) Musician and composer, Appleton James P. Leary (2014) Folklorist and director, Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, UW–Madison

Dietram Scheufele (2012) Professor and director of Graduate Studies, Dept. of Life Sciences Communications, UW–Madison Irving Shain (1996) Chancellor emeritus, UW–Madison

Barbara Brown Lee (2008) Chief educator, Milwaukee Art Museum

Bassam Z. Shakhashiri (2005) Profe s s o r of ch e m i s t r y, UW–Madison

David Lenz (2009) Painter and 2009 winner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Competition, Shorewood

Peter Sheehan (2006) Curator emeritus of geology, Milwaukee Public Museum

Harvey Littleton (2001)* Glass artist, Spruce Pine, North Carolina

Ben Sidran (1996) Musician, composer, and producer, Madison

Truman Lowe (2005) Artist, curator of National Museum of the American Indian, Washington D.C., professor, UW–Madison

Hans Sollinger (2006) Surgeon and professor of medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health

Nancy O. Lurie (1986) Curator emeritus of anthropology, Milwaukee Public Museum

Jeremi Suri (2011) Professor of history, University of Texas at Austin

Katharine C. Lyall (2003) Former UW System President, Madison

Stanley A. Temple Conservation biologist and co-founder of Project Passenger Pigeon, UW–Madison

John J. Magnuson (2014) Professor emeritus of zoology and director emeritus of the Center for Limnology, UW–Madison Dennis G. Maki (2003) Professor emeritus UW–Medical School, Madison Lorrie Moore (2009) author and former UW–Madison Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities, Nashville, Tenessee Karlos Moser (2009) Former University Opera conductor and Fox Valley Symphony founding conductor Warren Nelson (2005) Founder and former producer and executive director of Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua Don Nichols (2011)* Professor emeritus of economics and public affairs, UW–Madison Sara O’Connor (1993) Former managing director, Milwaukee Repertory Theater

Athan Theoharis (2003) Professor emeritus of history, Marquette University, Milwaukee James A. Thomson (2002) Professor, UW– Madison Medical School, and scientific director, WiCell Research Institute Kerry Trask (2008) Former professor of history, UW–Manitowoc Tom Uttech (2004) Artist, Saukville Ronald Wallace (1996) Author, poet, professor of English, UW–Madison Lee Weiss (1985) Watercolor artist, Madison Allen Young (2002) Curator emeritus, invertebrate zoology, Milwaukee Public Museum Robert S. Zigman (1989) Former chairman, Zigman Joseph Skeen, Inc., Milwaukee

JoAnna Poehlman (2011) Mixed media artist, Milwaukee Rev. Francis Paul Prucha (1986) Professor emeritus of history, Marquette University, Milwaukee

*In Memoriam: Wisconsin Academy Fellows: Harvey Littleton (1922– 2013), Don Nichols (1940–2013), Don Reitz (1929–2014)

Photo credit: Megan Monday Photography

NEW FELLOWS WELCOMED IN 2014 In a April 17, 2014, ceremony at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, the public joined us in welcoming seven new Wisconsin Academy Fellows: 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 (pictured left).

To learn more about our Fellows program, or to nominate someone you know as a Wisconsin Academy Fellow, please visit wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

In appreciation of our 2013–2014 DONORS AND SPONSORS As an independent nonprofit, we rely on your generosity to cover the cost of programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. We are pleased to publicly acknowledge those individuals and organizations who gave cash or in-kind contributions of $100 or more to support the operations and programs of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.

Thank you to all of our 2013–2014 season supporters for joining us in the effort to create a better, smarter Wisconsin.

THE MINERVA SOCIETY: A gathering of our most generous donors who contribute an annual gift of $10,000+ Anonymous Karl Andersen Tom and Renee Boldt Sally Mead Hands Foundation John Huston Design The Joyce Foundation Ruth DeYoung Kohler Madison Community Foundation —Great Performance Fund —John W. Thompson* Estate of Nancy Rae Noeske* Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation Wisconsin Academy Foundation

Annual contributions of $5,000 to $9,999 Dane Arts DoubleTree Hotel The Evjue Foundation, Inc., the charitable arm of The Capital Times Evjue Foundation Great Performance Endowment Walter A. & Dorothy Jones Frautschi Charitable Unitrust Dan & Roberta Gelatt Jack Kussmaul Sheldon & Marianne Lubar Park Printing Solutions UW–Madison UW–Milwaukee Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

Annual contributions of $2,500 to $4,999 Helen Bader Foundation

Ann Bardeen-Henschel 1999 Trust Patricia A. Brady Richard & Ann Burgess Center for Land Use Education, UW–Stevens Point Ron and Dorothy Daggett Endowment Fund Mary Lynne Donohue & Tim Van Akkeren W. Jerome Frautschi Good for Business Claire & Glen Hackmann Millard & Barbara Susman University Research Parks Wisconsin Public Television Tom Wolfe & Pat Powers

Annual contributions of $1,000 to $2,499 Anonymous (14) Alliant Energy Foundation John H. Ashley Douglas & Sherry Caves Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin —Mark & Ann Bradley Fund Culver’s VIP Foundation, Inc. John J. Frautschi Family Foundation, Inc. Greater Milwaukee Foundation —JayKay Foundation Fund The Great Performance Fund at the Madison Community Foundation —Betty & Corkey Custer* Arthur J. Harrington Carroll Heideman Jesse & Nancy Ishikawa Lori Lins Ltd. Tom & Wendy Luljak Katharine C. Lyall Madison Community Foundation —Mary P. Burke Education —Terry L. Haller Fund Jim & Joy Perry

Millie & Irv Shain Tim & Pat Size Michael J. Spector Gerald D. Viste G. Lane & Linda Ware Wisconsin Arts Board Wisconsin Humanities Council

Annual contributions of $500 to $999 Anonymous Anne Bolz Marion & John A. Bolz Center for Water Policy, UW-Milwaukee Lynne & William Eich Roberta Filicky-Peneski Robert M. Goodman Dion Kempthorne Stephen D. Morton Pamela Ploetz & John Henderson Barbara & Bob Sorensen Sustainability Leadership Program, Edgewood College Kerry A. Trask UW Extension Lakes UW–Stevens Point Shirley G. Wilde Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy Daniel Zielinski Jennifer Zorr

Annual contributions of $250 to $499 Anonymous (2) Charles & Mary Anderson Jerry & Ruth Apps R. Alta Charo Richard Davidson Greg & MaryAnn Dombrowski William & Alexandra Dove Jay & Mary Gallagher

Deirdre W. Garton Joseph & Patricia Heim Frank Horlbeck Bruce E. Jacobs Barbara Johnson Herbert H. Kohl Charities Inc. David Lenz Jay & Janet Loewi James T. Lundberg Stewart Macaulay Niki J. McGlathery Megan Monday Photography Larry Nesper Thomas & Teresa Pleger Nicholas Reiland Andrew Richards Dietram A. Scheufele

Annual contributions of $100 to $249 Anonymous (6) Shirley & Seymour Abrahamson Julius & Hilde Adler Richard & Alice Appen Leigh & Linda Aschbrenner Alfred Bader Dennis & Naomi Bahcall Tino Balio & Mary Pinkerton Dr. Brooks Becker Fred J. Berman Rv TR Thomas Bliffert Barbara Buenger Mary Jane Bumby Jeffrey Calder Donna & Arnold Chandler Citizens Natural Resources Association Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler Dan & Pat Cornwell Sheila Coyle James & Nancy Dast Donald Davis Larry & Kathy Dickerson Patrick & Lloyd Eagan Herman Felstehausen Jane & Patrick Fitzgibbons

Kathy Kelsey Foley & Ernest P. Foley Mary & Jerry Foote Bernard Friedman Linda Garrity, PhD Raymond & Joyce Gloeckler Rich & Georgi Gordon Joan & George Hall Reed & Ellie Hall L. Jane Hamblen James Haney Sheila Clark Hanrahan Daniel Hausman Susan & Stephen Hawk John Hawley Paul & Philia Hayes James V. Howard Interactivity Foundation Tina Jackson Molly & Bob Jahn Thomas W. & Giovanna M. Jeffries Norman & Nancy Jensen Geneva Johnson Deborah Kern Kenneth W. Korb Maury Laws Roma E. Lenehan Kent Lesandrini Margaret Lewis Orie & Elinor Loucks John & Norma Magnuson Mary Jo McBrearty Howard & Nancy Mead George L.N. Meyer Family Foundation David Mladenoff & Deborah Hobbins Thomas & Nancy Mohs Charles & Carolyn Mowbray Ellen Murdoch John & Kristina Murphy Robert Newbery & Nancy Sugden Peter Ostlind Paul Pagel John & Carol Palmer Ruth & Seymour Parter Ann F. Peckham

*Endowment gifts directed to the Academy Foundation ensure future success of our mission to connect Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world.

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

Edward & Dianne Peters Kenneth Potter & Deborah Spencley Sandra & Christopher Queram John R. Race Louis & Fran Rall Glenn Reinl & Sara Krebsbach JoAnne Robbins & David K. Falk Richard & Barbara Roe Janet R. Ross Linn Roth John Rothschild Kathleen & Dennis Sampson Dean & Orange Schroeder William & Judith Schuele Peter & Carrie Sherrill Amanda E. Shilling James & Kathryn Shilling Miriam Simmons & James Cain Marcus & Blanche Singer T. Elaine Staaland Stanley A. Temple Mary & Roy Thilly Maxine Triff Elizabeth Tuttle U.S. Venture/Schmidt Family Foundation, Inc. Peg & Ron Wallace Frank & Mariana Weinhold Lee Weiss Paul H. Williams Helen L. Wineke Alan & Beth Wolf Marty Wood Rosalind Woodward Allen M. Young M. Crawford Young George Zografi Dave Zweifel

Tribute & Memorial Gifts G. Lane Ware Jackie Macaulay Peggy Sherman Pradeep Rohatghi Robin Chapman

Photo credits: Noeske photo courtesy of Schmidt & Bartelt; all others UW–Madison Archives and Record Management Services

Ira Baldwin

Elizabeth McCoy

Harry Steenbock

Nancy Noeske

The Full Circle Society

A special thank you to our Full Circle Society, a group of forward-thinking individuals who have pledged a legacy gift to the Wisconsin Academy. Through their generosity, our legacy donors ensure that the Wisconsin Academy’s capacity to provide quality programs and publications continues for our members and all citizens of Wisconsin—today and tomorrow.

Ira Baldwin* Terry Haller Gunnar Johansen Jack Kussmaul David Lundahl Elizabeth McCoy* Nancy Rae Noeske* Jim and Joy Perry Harry Steenbock* Also, thank you to the many donors whose contributions to the Great Performance Fund at the Madison Community Foundation have benefited the Academy’s ongoing programming at Overture Center.

Members and friends of the Wisconsin Academy are encouraged to consider a legacy gift. Your investment benefits the health of our endowment, while ensuring the future of our programs and publications. For more information, contact Amanda E. Shilling, director of development, at 608-263-1692 x16. If you have already made a commitment, but are not listed, please contact us. *gifts received

If your name is missing from our acknowledgment list or misspelled, we apologize. Please call us at 608-263-1692 with corrections or omissions.

2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT

COMMUNITY PARTNERS, VOLUNTEERS, AND PRESENTERS Thank you to the multitudes of individuals and organizations that support the Wisconsin Academy and its programs with the invaluable dedication of time, talent, or services. Your commitment to our mission makes all the difference.

James Watrous Gallery Exhibiting Artists Pamela Callahan Barry Roal Carlsen Venetia Dale Donald Friedlich Lisa Gralnick David M. Lenz Cathy Martin John Miller Kevin Miyazaki Charles Munch Dennis Nechvatal Jill Olm Beth Racette Dianne Soffa Tom Uttech Leslie Vansen Rhea Vedro Ida Wyman Program Partners, Speakers, & Volunteers Helen Aarli Mark Blank Paul Douglas Tory Folliard Kevin Hamilton Melanie Herzog Angela Johnson Annette Mahler Tim O'Neill Michael Telzrow

Wisconsin People & Ideas Writers & Contributors Todd Ambs Jerry Apps Artisan Gallery Linda Aschbrenner Kate Bausch James Beards Deborah Beck & Frederic H. Sweet Luke Benson Roland Berns Jennifer Bethel Lois Bielefeld Anthony Bredahl Royal Broil B. Marcus Cederstrom Heidi Clausen Carol Corey Dino Corvino Susanna Daniel Susan Day Bruce Dethlefsen

Drew Dies Jeff Durbin Emily Eggleston Barb Feltz/Friends of the Little Plover River Troye Fox Max Garland Peter Gorman Daniel Goscha Family of Harold Grutzmacher Gundersen Health System Joseph Heim Melaine Herzog Ronnie Hess Buzz Hoffman Laura L. Hunt Schott Jackson Peter Jakubowski Erika Janik Melvin R. Laird Laura Lane Jean Lang Robert G. Lange Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory John Lehman Madison Public Library Martin Jenich Photography Megan Monday Eric Miller Jeff Miller Judy Mitchell Chrissy Mount Museum of Wisconsin Art Simon Nathan Erik Ness Andrea Paulseth Ron Porter Nancy Rafal Mike Rebholz Dan Reiland Tyler Robbins James Sajdak Larry Sanders Terri Schlichenmeyer Shanna Wolf Photography Sally Slattery Brendon A. Smith Jennifer A. Smith Casey Thayer US Fish and Wildlife Service Sharon Vanomy of SV Heart Photography Jason Vaughn Bob Wake Kevin Walsh & Sue Clausing

WDNR, Bureau of Wildlife Management West CAP/Peter Kilde Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism Wisconsin State Energy Office Sarah Witman Graham Yeager Program Partners Big Top Chautauqua The Clearing Folk School Huston Design Park Printing Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts Wisconsin Book Festival Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Wisconsin Public Radio Wisconsin Public Television

Wisconsin Initiatives Speakers Timothy R. Asplund Bill Bland Kenneth Bradbury Jon Fosgitt Michael Hahn Maria Janowiak Torbjörn Lahti David Liebl Galen McKinley Paul Meier Michelle Miller Shaili Pfeiffer Kenneth Potter Bret Shaw Joe Tomandl, III Dan Vimont John Welter Don Wichert Program Partners & Volunteers Ash Anandanarayanan Peter Bakken Jim Baumann Carolyn Betz Rich Bishop Stephen Born Dennis Boyer Joseph Britt Ann Brummitt Kelly Cain Mike Carlson

Representative Fred Clark Chris Clayton Bill Davis Charles Dunning Eric Ebersberger Tom Eggert Kevin Fermanich Ken Genskow Marilyn Goris Madeline Gotkowitz Bill Hafs Moira Harrington Marcia Hartwig Brenna Holzhauer Linda & Reynolds Honold John Imes Emily Jones Jenny Kehl Peter Kilde Tom Krapf Kathy R. Kuntz Richard Kyte Kassandra Lang Dick Lathrop Patricia Leavenworth Randy Lehr John J. Magnuson Curt Meine Ezra Meyer Richard Monette Representative Jeffrey Mursau Randy Poelma Rebecca Power Linda Reid Keith Reopelle Victoria Rydberg Anne Sayers Mary Schlaefer Denise Schmidt Ron Seely Jenny Seifert Kirsten Shead Michael Strigel Dave Taylor Jim VandenBrook Jake Vander Zanden Kim Walz Kimberlee Wright

Susan Elbe Chukuka Enwemeka Hannah Gaines Day Kate Golden Andy Hall Francis Halzen Michael Kienitz Laura Kiessling Patty Loew Bill Lueders Thomas C. Pleger Craig Schreiner Jim St. Arnold Terry Tempest Williams Stanley A. Temple Sam Weller Program Partners Hubbard Avenue Diner Isthmus Publishing Company Janesville Performing Arts Center La Crosse Public Education Foundation Morgridge Institute for Research Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Orange Tree Imports Pump House Regional Arts Center School District of La Crosse UW–Whitewater Wisconsin Veterans Museum Wisconsin Watch

Volunteers, Interns, & Gallery Attendants Joseph Borgwardt Augusta Brulla Amanda Dailey Anna Laube Bronte Mansfield Jerry Marra Joseph Moskwa Augusta Scescke Xin Wang Chelsea Wyman

Wisconsin Academy Talks & Special Events Speakers Steven Ackerman Jasmine Alinder R. Alta Charo Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler Richie Davidson

Many individuals shared their time and talents with multiple Academy programs, they are only listed once.

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

S p r i n g

WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

From Clash to Consensus: A History of Wisconsin Theater Tuesday, April 28, 7–8:30 pm Mead Public Library, 710 North 8th St., Sheboygan American Players Theatre’s David Frank tells the story of how he left the British theater for America in 1966 and how he has spent a career reconciling the self-conscious, English approach to theater with the wild innovations he found on the American stage. Free to the public with advance registration, this special talk is presented by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in partnership with Mead Public Library and UW–Sheboygan.

Vitamin D: A Pharmaceutical Fountain Tuesday, May 12, 7–8:30 pm Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Lecture Hall, 221 State St., Madison Biochemist and Wisconsin Academy Fellow Hector DeLuca shares the profound application of Vitamin D in medicine, including in the treatment of osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Free with advance registration, this talk is brought to you by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Craig Clifford: Fragments Rafael Francisco Salas: Wasted Days & Wasted Nights Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view May 22–July 5 Opening reception Friday, May 22 5:30– 7:30 pm, with artists’ talks at 6:30 pm

Left: Craig Clifford, Flower Brick, 2014. Earthenware, slipcast and handbuilt, 17 x 17 x 17 inches.

Right: Rafael Francisco Salas, Dirty Water, 2014. Mixed media on paper, 36 x 60 inches.

Join us for side-by-side solo exhibitions from Craig Clifford and Rafael Francisco Salas. Working in brilliantly glazed ceramic, Craig Clifford casts found objects and combines them into tableaux in which natural imagery collides with pure kitsch. Rafael Salas’ large-scale drawings of small things describe a territory somewhere inbetween landscape and still life. This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details