Wisconsin People & Ideas – Winter 2016

wisc

people & ideas

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

Tom Berenz: Workingman Blue Surveying the internal landscapes of a Milwaukee artist

Music for Cats In search of the science behind species-specific music

Inside Cedar Grove’s Living Machine $5.00 Vol. 62, No. 1

Winter 2016

Bob Wills and the quest to build a more sustainable cheese

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

Contents

winter 2016 FEATURES 4 FROM THE Director Writing Our Future

6 Upfront 6 A landmark exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum gets an update.

8 UW–Madison artist and chemist collaborate on solar cloth.

9 Catching up with Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser.

10 FEllows Forum Historian and Wisconsin Academy Fellow John Gurda shares the story behind his new hometown chronicle, Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods. administrative offices/steenbock gallery 1922 university ave. | madison, WI 53726 tel. 608-263-1692 www.wisconsinacademy.org

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

16 Wisconsin Table Shelby Deering takes us inside Cedar Grove Cheese factory and its magnificent Living Machine.

20 Project Dena Wortzel introduces us to ShopTalk, a new conversation series about working life by the Wisconsin Humanities Council.

24 ESSAY What kind of music does your pet like? Jacob Turner goes in search of the science behind species-specific music.

30 ESSAY

Poet Lisa Vihos introduces us to Wisconsinites who are harnessing

the power of poetry for social change.

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

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

Photo credit: Cedar Grove Cheese

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Copyright Š 2016 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. All rights reserved. Postage is paid at Madison, Wisconsin. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address above.

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Elliott Puckette & Jacob Turner, editorial assistants CX Dillhunt, cold reader Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Tom Berenz, 2016. Photograph

by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

In the quest to create more sustainable cheese, Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain uses aquaponics to treat wastewater from the plant. See page 16 to learn more.

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winter 2016 FEATURES 34 @ The James Watrous Gallery

Rafael Francisco Salas surveys the inner landscapes of Milwaukee-based

painter Tom Berenz.

43 Read Wisconsin

Finding the time to write 44 FIctiON

“Stones,” by Kathryn Gahl, the third place-prizewinning short story from

our 2015 Fiction Contest.

45 Book Reviews 45 Bill Berry reviews Wisconsin Agriculture: A History, by Jerry Apps 47 Karla Huston reviews a berserker stuck in traffic, by Erik Richardson 50 Poetry

Poems from our 2015 Poetry Contest honorable mention poets.

55 2015 Annual Report

A review of Academy programs and publications, and an appreciation of

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

our members, donors, and sponsors.

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder • Executive Director Rachel Bruya • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Zachary Carlson • Web Editor Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai • Project Coordinator Meredith Keller • Initiatives Director Elysse Lindell • Outreach & Data Coordinator Don Meyer • Business Operations Manager Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Communications Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Officers of the Board Linda Ware • President Tim Size • President-elect Millard Susman • Immediate-past President Diane Nienow • Treasurer James W. Perry • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Marianne Lubar • Vice President of Arts Cathy Cofell-Mutschler • Vice President of Letters

Reprinted by permission of the artist

Statewide Board of Directors Leslie D. Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Patricia Brady, Madison Malcolm Brett, Oregon Frank D. Byrne, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan L. Jane Hamblen, Madison Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Kevin Reilly, Verona Bob Wagner, Mequon Marty Wood, Eau Claire

Milwaukee artist Tom Berenz’s, Garden Above the Lake, 2014. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas, 60 in. x 72 in. See more of Berenz’s work on page 34.

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Officers of the Academy Foundation Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Jack Kussmaul • Foundation President Andrew Richards • Foundation Vice President Diane Nienow • Foundation Treasurer David J. Ward • Foundation Secretary Foundation Directors Jane Elder Terry Haller Millard Susman Linda Ware

Contents 

NEWS for

MEMBERS Discounts for Academy Members Wisconsin Academy members enjoy discounts on our receptions and registrations that require a fee. Make sure to register online as an Academy member to receive these discounts. If you have a question about your membership, please contact development director Amanda Shilling at 608-263-1692 x16 or ashilling@wisconsinacademy.org.

Academy Connections Last December we delivered the second edition of Academy Connections, our quarterly e-update for members that provides a peek inside the workings of your Academy. If you did not receive your issue, please e-mail members@ wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692.

New Website Rollout We’re pleased to announce to members and friends an update to our popular website wisconsinacademy.org, beginning on March 1, 2016. Look for new features that • make event information and registration easy to find • enhance learning opportunities across programs and publications • better connect our members and friends • add context to new and existing content • put a face on our work • bring our mission, vision, and values to the fore New Academy Board Members The Wisconsin Academy Board is pleased to announce the election of new board members, starting their service on January 15, 2016: • Frank D. Byrne MD, Madison President Emeritus, St. Mary’s Hospital • L. Jane Hamblen, Madison Retired, Chief Legal Counsel, State of Wisconsin Investment Board • Kevin Reilly, Verona President Emeritus, UW System • Bob Wagner, Milwaukee CEO, R&B Wagner Inc.

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Paul Bartlett is a freelance art director, designer, and illustrator. A graduate of UW–Milwaukee, his work has been honored in Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, and How. Bartlett lives in Madison with his wife and two children. He doesn’t have any cats, but he does have a pug—the cat of dogs. See more of his work at pjbart.com.

Bill Berry grew up in Green Bay and earned undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. After more than 20 years as a reporter, columnist, and editor for several daily newspapers, he redirected his energy to communicate about conservation and agriculture. A columnist for the Capital Times, he lives in Stevens Point with his wife. He is the father of two daughters.

Shelby Deering is a freelance writer who lives in Madison. She writes for several national magazines and regional publications, including Experience Wisconsin and BRAVA. Deering loves to explore new restaurants around Madison, and she has never met a cheese she doesn’t like.

Karla Huston is the author of A Theory of Lipstick (Main Street Rag, 2013) as well as seven chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Outside of a Dog (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Huston’s poems, reviews, and interviews have been published widely, including in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012). She lives in Appleton.

TJ Lambert considers herself a Milwaukee native, even though she was born in Platteville. She founded Stages Photography in 1999, after honing her documentary style of photography through shoots in the British Isles and the Maldives. Today she has a thriving photography business, five kids, a great husband, and a hundred-pound German Shepherd. Her website is tjlambert-stages.com.

Rafael Francisco Salas is a Wisconsin based painter. His work has been exhibited in New York City and San Diego as well as the Midwest and Wisconsin, including the Neville Public Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Dean Jensen Gallery, Circa Gallery, and Portrait Society Gallery. Salas is an associate professor of art at Ripon College and a contributing writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Jacob Turner is the creator of the Hazel Fluffypants: Writer Kitty (hazelfluffypants.com). Turner also manages the UW Comics Club, which represents a network of Lynda Barry’s students. Through the club, Turner and his fellow Badger cartoonists have presented comics and delivered workshops at conferences and events throughout the Midwest.

Lisa Vihos is a poet with works appearing in numerous print and online journals. She has two chapbooks: A Brief History of Mail (Pebblebrook Press, 2011) and The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012). In addition to her work with One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change, Vihos is poetry and arts editor for Stoneboat Literary Journal. She lives in Sheboygan, and is happily working as a grant writer for the Lakeshore Natural Resource Partnership.

Dena Wortzel worked with the Wisconsin Humanities Council since 1994 before becoming director in 2008. Prior to 1994, she supported community development efforts in developing nations and educated Americans about issues of world hunger and poverty. Today she lives on a former dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin where she rides horses, chases chickens, and wages war on more invasive species than she cares to name.

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Writing Our Future Jane Elder wisconsin academy Executive director Anyone reading this magazine will likely agree that writing can help us envision and shape our future. Writing enables us to capture ideas, reflect on and improve them, and share them widely.

The power of great writing is that it can be personal and universal at the same time. It helps us see ourselves and our world in deeper ways, and is one of the great joys of being human. Writing is a gateway to insight and wisdom, and Wisconsin needs both these days.

Stories in particular help to expand our concepts of who we are and what is possible. Our brains are hard wired to process stories, an evolutionary adaptation honed over tens of thousands of years of effectively conveying information to subsequent generations.

At the Midwestern premier of her play Silent Sky in Madison last fall, playwright Lauren Gunderson spoke about the science behind storytelling. She mentioned the evolutionary advantages our species has derived from stories, and noted how fiction, for example, allows us to take risks. In fiction we can imagine a future—or any number of futures—with little fear of condemnation or recrimination by those living in the present.

Stories, said Gunderson, also enable us to see things from points of view other than our own. Further, exploring these viewpoints can foster empathy and understanding that can help reduce social conflict.

In addition to writing books about the past, historian and Academy Fellow Jerry Apps also writes fiction that grapples with contemporary issues such as development pressures on family farms, frac sand mining impacts on rural communities, and the potential risks associated with genetically modified foods.

To examine how communities are affected by conflict, Apps employs deftly drawn characters who eschew the simplistic good guy/bad guy dichotomy that dominates so much political rhetoric today. His characters resemble our friends and neighbors. Their conflicts are ours, as elegantly expressed in an editorial by Stony Field, a character in Apps’ The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County: The little village of Link Lake in central Wisconsin has torn itself apart these past few months as it debated and then protested a decision made by its village officials to allow a sand mine to open in its cherished village park. It’s a debate that has occurred often in the country: what is more important? Economic development, or history and the environment? And why not all three of equal

When a conflict seems insurmountable and discussion turns rancorous, sometimes writing can help us understand the issues at the heart of the struggle.

In “The Essay I began writing while walking to the Wisconsin Capitol Trying to Discern the Right Question 2/14/11,” Madison poet Wendy Vardaman reflects on her role as poet and newly minted political activist: “So what am I doing on day 11 or 12 of the protests in Madison on a marble floor, my yoga mat doubled beneath me, my sleeping bag rolled behind me, writing as fast as I can in my notebook outside the State Library Office of the Capitol’s 3rd floor at midnight?”

Her questions lead to more questions about why she needs to participate in the protests and in what ways this participation is both a form of testimony and an expression of solidarity.

“It’s not that anyone needs any of the poems I’ve written, or any particular poem at all,” she writes. “But it’s how I join my voice (the one I find while writing) to the voices that collect around me like needles needling, like marbles dropping on marble, and I need to give voice to these thoughts, as you do too.

To give witness, sometimes, to the people and the events around us through our poems.”

Writers and their works help us navigate the world around us—sometimes it is as critic, sometimes as witness, sometimes as truth sayer.

Ben Logan, Wisconsin naturalist and author of the beloved memoir about rural Crawford County, The Land Remembers, once wrote, “Books can wake things in us that have been wanting to surface, tell us things we are ready to know, affirm those thoughts we have been feeling but have not yet given coherence.”

What wants to surface in Wisconsin? What are we ready to know? What will writing tell us about ourselves?

In an effort to explore these questions—and to discover some others—we’ve developed a program theme for winter and spring 2016: Writing Wisconsin’s Future. With essays in Wisconsin People & Ideas and a series of Academy Talks, we’ll look at our state through the lens of writing as an act of social engagement.

Through Writing Wisconsin’s Future, we’ll tap into the creative capacities and insights of scholars, journalists, novelists, and poets to explore how the written word and the narrative process are contributing to community building, environmental literacy, citizen engagement, and other tools that can build a better future for Wisconsin.

importance?

Stony Field’s questions are the kind our state and communities wrestle with today. And our answers to them will certainly shape the Wisconsin of future generations.

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

WISCONSIN ACADEMY WINTER/SPRING 2016 EVENTS & EXHIBITIONS The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters produces programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. Our public talks, discussion forums, and art exhibitions are fantastic resources for informed and engaged citizens of all ages who appreciate the value of discovery and learning. See our winter/spring schedule below or visit wisconsinacademy.org/calendar for a complete list of upcoming Wisconsin Academy events and exhibitions open to the public. Your participation helps create a brighter Wisconsin. Join us!

@ the James Watrous Gallery

Academy Talk

Debbie Kupinsky & Allison Welch: Side-by-side Solo Exhibitions

Writing Wisconsin’s Future Series: Part II

On view January 15–March 6 Meet Allison, an American Girl, an ongoing series

by Allison Welch (Oshkosh), recreates the wardrobes, accessories, and stories of American Girl dolls. Sculptor Debbie Kupinsky (Appleton) makes porcelain images of mundane objects that delve into personal history.

Academy Talk

Writing Wisconsin’s Future Series: Part I Tuesday, February 23, from 7–8:00 pm University of Wisconsin Biotechnology Center Auditorium • Madison For Writing Wisconsin’s Climate, UW–Madison journalism scholar and science communicator Sharon Dunwoody discusses the evolution and influence of stories about climate change.

Academy Talk

The Burden of Poor Health Tuesday, March 8, from 7–8:00 pm Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum • Wausau Dr. Theresa Duello discusses how social and biological causes combine to create health disparities in rural and urban areas of Wisconsin. Come early for a 6:00 pm reception and meet the presenter.

POETRY READING

Poetry & Pi(e)* Monday, March 14, from 5:00–6:30 pm WI Academy Steenbock Center Offices • Madison Join us on Pi Day for coffee, homemade pie, and a reading featuring Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser. @ the James Watrous Gallery

Tom Berenz & Shane McAdams: Side-by-side Solo Exhibitions On view March 18–May 8 Opening reception on Friday, March 18, from 5:30–7:30 pm Tom Berenz (Milwaukee) combines recognizable bits of life with swaths of color and pattern. Shane McAdams (Cedarburg) paints familiar, classic landscape scenes disrupted by synthetic elements.

Special thanks to our members, donors, and the following sponsors and partners for supporting our mission of connecting Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world:

Tuesday, March 22, from 7–8:30 pm Lecture Hall, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art • Madison In Writing Wisconsin’s Waterways, environmental journalist Peter Annin and author Jerry Apps share the story of water in Wisconsin and provide some insight into where it has been—and where it is going.

Traveling Exhibition

The Archive as a River: Paul Vanderbilt and Photography On view March 31–May 1 Wriston Art Center Galleries, Lawrence University • Appleton Developed in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society Division of Library–Archives, this James Watrous Gallery traveling exhibition celebrates the work of archivist, photographer, and visionary Paul Vanderbilt (1905–1992), who sought new ways to understand the world through visual images.

AWARD Ceremony

2016 Academy Fellows Awards* Sunday, April 17, from 1–3:00 pm Pyle Center Alumni Lounge • UW–Madison Join us to celebrate the election of eleven new Wisconsin Academy Fellows, Wisconsinites with extraordinary levels of accomplishment as well as a commitment to intellectual discourse and public service.

Academy Talk

Writing Wisconsin’s Future Series: Part III Tuesday, May 3, from 7–8:30 pm Wisconsin Studio, Overture Center for the Arts • Madison In Writing Wisconsin’s Communities, Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser leads a panel of poets from across the state in a discussion about how creative writing can engage—and energize—a community. *Registration fee required for these events.

The Great Performance Fund at the Madison Community Foundation

Sally Mead Hands Foundation

UPFRONT

The New Streets of Old Milwaukee Reimagining a Landmark Exhibit handyman of history.” A fiftieth birthday, he adds, represents “no ordinary accomplishment.”

“Streets has become part of Milwaukee’s history. We’re very excited to build on that history by implementing changes that will enhance not only the Streets themselves, but deliver the kind of visitor experience contemporary museum-goers expect,” says Dennis Kois, Milwaukee Public Museum President and CEO. One such enhancement includes the streetcar that forms the new entrance to the exhibit. Video screens run down both sides of the car. As visitors walk through the streetcar—moving from daylight to dusk—they travel up the stream of history, watching the passing scene of historical changes to iconic Milwaukee businesses, churches, and other buildings as well as passersby in period garb from 1910 to 1950 to today.

The Milwaukee Public Museum recently unveiled some big changes to their beloved Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit, integrating 21st century digital technology to enhance this slice of turnof-the-century Milwaukee life. But, never fear: Granny, cobblestones, and the candy shop all remain in this famous walk-through diorama.

Since the Streets of Old Milwaukee first opened in January 1965, millions of visitors have passed through a streetlevel experience of another generation’s Milwaukee. Gaslit lamps, penny candy, and well-preserved antiques of the era—many of which were donated by community members—remain the heart and soul of the exhibit’s immersive experience.

“Most museum exhibits go ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years before being totally changed,” says Al Muchka, the Milwaukee Public Museum exhibits curator and veteran “general 6

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At the streetcar entrance, visitors can download a new interactive app that prompts audio narratives as they approach specific locations. The audio, often in the form of stories told by local characters, provides intimate glimpses of early-20th century life.

The app adds even more depth to a carefully designed exhibit that is full of elements both fascinating and nuanced. Newly installed walls of Cream City brick, an architectural staple of the time, are plastered with German-language flyers advertising entertainment and political theater.

Video-projected shadows of workers flicker across Falk Company factory windows, and recorded scenes viewed opaquely through the original 1893 Pfister Hotel doors evoke the immediacy of human activity.

Sound tracks add another dimension to the experience, recreating the noises Milwaukeeans would have heard walking

UPFRONT

Opposite page: New additions to the Streets of Old Milwaukee include a courtyard comprised of the Falk Company, North Side Lumber & Fuel, the Rexnord streetcar, Sendik’s fruit and vegetable cart, and the streetcar garage barn. Sendik’s cart in front of the Falk Foundry, which made huge cast steel and machined components in the Menomonee Valley. Chartered in 1904, North Side Lumber & Fuel (today Bliffert Lumber & Hardware) represents the many lumber and fuel purveyors that were important in providing the material to build and maintain Milwaukee’s many neighborhoods.

This page: Elements like authentic antiques in the General Store (top) visible activity in the Pfister Lobby (middle), and a twilight mural by the fountain (bottom) add nuance.

All photos reprinted courtesy of Milwaukee Public Museum

the streets in real time: the clip-clop of horses and the whistles of trains rising in crescendo before receding into the background again. Visitors can lean against the window of an auto mechanic’s garage to hear his frustrated mutters, even listen in on the telephone outside the General Store to eavesdrop on a party line conversation.

“The renovation of Streets gives us an incredible opportunity to both enrich [what’s] already there by taking visitors deeper into the magical experience of going back in time … [and] also to weave into that experience the viewpoints of people who were living in the city at that time, but whose voices were left out,” says Kois.

The audio app and aesthetic digital wizardry represent the latest effort in an ongoing process to make the Streets as detailed and comprehensive as possible. The exhibit underwent an earlier series of changes in the late 1990s, which included the addition of the home of Sully Watson, a freed Virginia slave whose family went on to become a wealthy and prominent part of old Milwaukee society.

Before the Watson Family Home, the story of the Streets didn’t include an African-American voice. With the digital upgrades, the museum not only has amplified the immersive experience but also better represented the cultural and ethnic diversity of the era.

To learn more about the Milwaukee Public Museum or the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibition, go to mpm.edu or follow @MPMGranny on Twitter.

—Jacob Turner

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UPFRONT

Marianne Fairbanks is bringing decades of experience with dyes, fibers, and design to the development of a technology she’s been dreaming of for years: solar textile.

“I found myself on a campus full of brilliant people of all disciplines so I just Googled ‘solar research UW–Madison,’ ” says Fairbanks, assistant professor in the UW School of Human Ecology’s design studies program and co-founder of Noon Solar, a Chicago-based company that made solar-charged handbags.

The Google search led her to Trisha Andrew, a rising star in energy research and assistant professor of chemistry at the university. Andrew draws from the fields of chemistry, materials science, and electrical engineering to develop low-cost, lightweight solar cells. Her most recent innovation is an organic dye-based solar cell deposited onto paper.

Fairbanks comes from the art studio and Andrew from the chemistry lab, but the two women had an instant, if unexpected, rapport. Fairbanks, who arrived to their first meeting with a stack of textiles, got Andrew thinking about fabric and, by the end of the encounter, the collaboration had begun.

Andrew and her team are currently coating different weave types and structures with a polymer that increases the fabric’s conductivity tenfold. Once fully coated, the fabric will serve as the bottom electrode, and a base layer on which to build the rest of the solar cell.

“The idea of building solar cells on fabric is potentially transformative,” Andrew says. “If we take this technology to grow devices on material, then we could talk wearable technology as well as solar curtains, solar umbrellas, solar tents, or applications for the military.”

Though Fairbanks and Andrew are not the first to conceive of solar textiles, their collaboration overcomes a major manufacturing challenge that Andrew says is slowing the rollout of cheap, consumer-friendly solar cells: the early integration of technologies emerging from the lab with actual manufacturing processes.

“There’s no designer working with a device person trying to do this—that’s us—and that’s what really excites me about this project even today,” says Andrew.

With a recent grant funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and awarded by UW–Madison’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, Fairbanks and Andrew have begun experimenting with different ways to create solar textiles.

For instance, materials science and engineering graduate student Lushuai Zhang uses vapor phase chemistry to coat different fabric weave types and structures with a polymer that 8

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Photo credit: UW Communications

Solar Textile Collaboration Weaves Chemistry and Design

Above: University of Wisconsin–Madison chemist Trisha Andrew (left) and fabric artist Marianne Fairbanks (right) draw on the same fundamental properties that give dye molecules their color to conduct electricity and generate power through solar cloth.

increases its conductivity. Once the weave is at least ten times more conductive than it was before coating, the fabric acts as the bottom electrode on which Zhang can deposit two different dyes and a top electrode—the contact between the four deposits makes up a complete and functional solar cell.

A second idea grew from Fairbanks’ knowledge of weaving. Since the four layers of a dye-based solar cell don’t actually need to be placed down in sequence—the point being only to create the right contact between the four components—Fairbanks suggested they try creating a spool of thread for each of the components. If Fairbanks could then weave those threads together, two electrodes and two dyes, the weave’s cross-sections would also create the contact points necessary for a fully functional device.

“I thought that was brilliant,” Andrew says. “I never would’ve thought of that. If we could literally weave together a solar cell: mind blowing. We’re really integrating each step of the process, on the textile side, on the device side.”

By fall 2016, Fairbanks and Andrew hope to have developed a prototype using the coating technique as well as proof of concept for what Andrew affectionately calls “our harebrained weaving idea.” Either technique could mean many more years of translating their different disciplinary languages to each other for the purpose of creating usable, even wearable, technologies.

“Science and art aren’t too different,” Fairbanks says of the project. “We’re all experimenting. To get to do it together is a dream come true.”

—Krista Eastman This article originally appeared in On Wisconsin, Fall 2015. Reprinted by permission of UW–Madison University Communications.

UPFRONT

If poet Kimberly Blaeser had to use two words to describe her first year as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, they would be exhilarating and exhausting.

Blaeser, who was appointed to a twoyear term on January 7 last year, says her schedule has been filled with appearances across Wisconsin and beyond—fifty-one, to be exact.

In 2015, Blaeser did public readings at libraries (from Delafield to Rhinelander), bookstores (including Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern), schools (from Madison’s St. James grade school to Beloit College), art galleries (including MMoCA), parks (including Milwaukee’s Juneau Park), gardens (including Madison’s Olbrich Botanical Gardens) and festivals (from Chippewa Valley to Fox Cities), spreading the gospel of poetry and creativity.

From time to time Blaeser was also asked to deliver a poetic benediction to an event, as in during the legislative breakfast at Arts Day 2015 or the inauguration of incoming UWM Chancellor Mark Mone.

Blaeser found herself invited to a surprising number of conferences and panel discussions on the role of poetry, but also found that people outside of academe and the poetry world were equally eager to have her participate in a diverse selection of programs. Blaeser appeared at the Aldo Leopold Center’s “Building a Land Ethic” conference; in a segment of John McGivern’s WPT travel show, “Around the Corner;” and even played a role in the debut production of Morning Becomes Electa, a play about Electa Quinney, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians who became Wisconsin’s first public school teacher.

Even with a blistering schedule of 2015 appearances, Blaeser continued to publish, and to teach and work with UWM graduate students in creative writing. Drawing on her passion for teaching poetry and finding

ways for people to engage with poetry on multiple levels, she recently recorded a series of video segments for Wisconsin Writes, a program of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Wisconsin Writes provides a rare glimpse into the writing processes of Wisconsin writers from a variety of perspectives. The series captures the recursive, complex, often messy process of writing.

For her Wisconsin Writes segment, Blaeser shares her background in writing, why she uses different types of technology and mediums to write, and how images are an important part of her writing process. She then transitions into the revision process, explaining subtle changes she made to a historical poem about a prisoner of war named “Mochi,” and to “A Crane Language,” a picto-poem.

Picto-poems like “A Crane Language” combine original photography and verse as a way of exploring what Blaeser calls “the complex harmonies between the vibrant natural world and the resonant human imagination.” They are another way Blaeser hopes to connect with nontraditional audiences.

During October of 2015, an exhibition of her picto-poems and ekphrastic poetry (poems that vividly describe an image or work of art in order to amplify and expand its meaning), Ancient Light, was held in the Jones Gallery of the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson. As a part of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Festival, she gave a talk amid the exhibit, “Gesture and Silence in Poetry of Place,” that touched upon the ekphrastic poetry tradition.

Blaeser says she draws on the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) way of being in the world, which is part of her heritage and which involves a foundational understanding of community with nature. “My photographs and picto-poems arise from this understanding. They invite the viewer/reader to imagine themselves in such a space.”

Photo credit: Kevin J. Miyazaki

Catching Up with Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser

Appearances at the 2015 Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison and at the South East Wisconsin Book Festival in Waukesha were part of the finale of Blaeser’s exhilarating and exhausting year.

She said that finding herself in a panel discussion with and performing alongside three of Wisconsin’s former Poet Laureates—Marilyn Taylor, Max Garland, and Bruce Dethlefsen—reinforced her sense of the state’s strong poetic tradition and the variety of voices it entails.

What does 2016 hold for the Wisconsin Poet Laureate?

Blaeser says her months are already filling with tantalizing events including a panel discussion for the Academy’s Writing Wisconsin’s Future series (see page 33), reading at the Nelson Institute’s Earth Day Conference in Madison, reading at the Nelson Institute’s Earth Day Conference in Madison, a height-of-color, nature writing workshop this October at the 320-acre UWM Field Station in Saukville, and a residency and performance at Shake Rag Alley. In addition she is working with Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission members to launch a poetry recitation project which will literally put poetry on Wisconsin’s map—allowing individuals and groups to upload videos of readings to an online map of the state. In conjunction with this, Blaeser will host public recitation events including one already scheduled at UW–Marathon County in March.

For more information on Kimberly Blaeser’s upcoming appearances, visit wisconsinpoetlaureate.org.

—Jason A. Smith

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Neighborhoods B y J o h n G u r da

Wisconsin Academy Fellow since 2009

Neighborhoods are quicksilver creations, constantly changing residents, borders, and even names. Take the neighborhoods of Milwaukee, for instance: one generation’s Sixth Ward is another’s Brewer’s Hill, a German enclave in one century becomes an African-American stronghold in the next.

All neighborhoods are changing neighborhoods. Always have been, always will be.

Anyone who spends a day driving around or even through Milwaukee can plainly see that the South Side is a different world from the East Side, the North and West Sides have disparate characters, and the Northwest Side is another territory entirely.

Within these and several other composite districts, we find dozens of neighborhoods, communities such as Bay View, Layton Park, Pigsville, Washington Heights, Rufus King, Riverwest, and North Point.

With a population of almost 600,000, Milwaukee is a large city.

But its neighborhoods render it both intelligible and approachable. While these neighborhoods come in many shapes, sizes, colors, and strengths, together they constitute the fundamental building blocks of the entire community.

In forty-plus years of studying my hometown, I’ve learned firsthand that every neighborhood has a story uniquely its own to tell. I firmly believe that telling their stories can encourage a sense of belonging within individual neighborhoods and a sense of mutual respect across neighborhood borders and even beyond the city limits. This is the impulse behind Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, a new book that is, if only by default, the most complete chronicle of grassroots Milwaukee ever published.

Of course, the subject practically guarantees rapid obsolescence.

Rapid change is a natural condition of communities that exist not by force of law but by virtue of perception. We codify some lines to identify census tracts or legislative districts or municipalities, but neighborhood borders simply float in our shared

awareness, perennially subject to both dispute and revision.

Milwaukee doesn’t have a Minneapolis-style confederation of neighborhoods with borders set by the city council, and it never attracted anything resembling the corps of sociologists who delineated Chicago’s “community areas” in the 1920s. All that’s possible is an informed and reasonable but patently imperfect interpretation of where one neighborhood ends and another begins.

Not that there haven’t been attempts to draw hard lines in the shifting sands of residential Milwaukee. Over the last half-century or so, academics, urban planners, and community activists have made repeated runs at an “official” map of Milwaukee neighborhoods.

The most ambitious effort dates to the late 1980s, when the Department of City Development (DCD) launched its Neighborhood Identification Project. The project’s goal was “a stable set of neighborhood boundaries” that would become “a recognized ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

WIsconsin ACADEMY FELLOWS Author and historian John Gurda became a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy in 2009.

Since 1982, the Wisconsin Academy has honored the best and brightest of Wisconsin.

The Fellows award acknowledges a high level of accomplishment as well as a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. The Fellows Forum section of the magazine provides a forum for our Fellows to share ideas and opinions about their work and lives. You can meet all of the Wisconsin Academy Fellows and learn about the Fellows program by visiting wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

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and engrained part of the fabric of the City in the future.” The Neighborhood Identification Project map was drafted with social uplift as well as consistent data sets in mind. “This will give every resident of Milwaukee,” promised the planners, “an opportunity to develop a sense of place, pride, and belonging in relation to where they live.”

The problem, if it may be so called, was that the project’s leaders were determined to put every square inch of the city in one named neighborhood or another, even when the lack of historical or organizational referents forced them to resort to whole cloth. My favorite fabrication was the area just east of the Allen-Bradley (Rockwell Automation) clock, which, presumably to the surprise of its residents, surfaced on the final map as “Clock Tower Acres.”

I was part of a similarly well-intentioned stab at the elusive geographic truth, again under City of Milwaukee auspices.

In 1982 Greg Coenen, manager of communications for DCD, conceived the Discover Milwaukee Program in an earlier attempt to encourage a sense of citizen belonging. As the Discover Milwaukee Program writer and researcher, I chose most of the neighborhoods; others were suggested by Coenen or dictated by higher-ups in the department.

The program’s signature product was a series of twentyseven posters painstakingly drawn by Janice Kotowicz, a DCD staff member with deep roots in the city. Kotowicz typically used a characteristic architectural feature for her illustration— a bungalow in Sherman Park, a Victorian storefront in Walker’s Point, a Polish flat in Riverwest—while I prepared magazinelength historical essays that appeared on the back of each poster. (My words were consigned to permanent oblivion if the art was ever hung for display.) The posters, which debuted in batches between 1983 and 1990, were hugely popular, showing up in corporate offices, TV interview rooms, public hallways, and thousands of private homes. They made Jan Kotowicz the most famous Milwaukee artist you’d never heard of.

Twenty years later, the posters were still in print and still in demand. In about 2010 I ran into Kotowicz at the South Shore Frolic in Bay View, the neighborhood we’ve both called home for many years, and she said, almost off-handedly, “We should turn those posters into a book.”

Thus, the idea for Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods was born.

The task had seemed relatively simple at first: update the original twenty-seven essays to reflect nearly three decades of change and then write perhaps a dozen new chapters on communities we never got to in the first round. The project evolved (as projects will) into something more complex: hundreds of miles of travel on foot and by bicycle, long days in local archives, and the constant struggle to hit a moving target so that the work seemed neither hopelessly anachronistic nor overly generic.

There were endless decisions to make, the first involving which neighborhoods to include. The roster is hardly exhaustive.

In the interests of time, space, and sanity, I confined myself to the pre-World War II city, an area defined roughly by Silver Spring Drive, Howard Avenue, Sixtieth Street, and the lake. Profiles of most of the neighborhoods within these borders are legacies of Greg Coenen’s Discover Milwaukee Program; others I added based on a thoroughly unscientific blend of subdivision borders, 12

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PIGSVILLE

A selection from Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods Pigsville, also known as the Valley, is, to put it mildly, unique.

Of all the neighborhoods that make up Milwaukee, it is among the smallest, certainly the most isolated, and without doubt the most unusually named. Sheltered by the bluffs of the Menomonee River, Pigsville is a compact community with a remarkably strong sense of place and a character all its own.

Although change has not passed it by, the neighborhood is well into its second century as a distinctive piece of the larger Milwaukee whole.

Beginning with Pigs The valley that became the Valley, or Pigsville, was quiet for most of the 19th century. The state’s first railroad chugged through on its way to Waukesha in 1851. There were occasional blasts from the stone quarry that now underlies Miller Park’s north lot. Teamsters entering the valley on Blue Mound Road probably cursed the steep inclines on both sides. A few blocks north, on the Watertown Plank Road, breweries owned by the Miller and Gettelman families kept beer flowing into a city whose thirst was growing as fast as its population. A handful of farmers, most of them German immigrants, tended fields on the valley floor. The most prominent was Adam Freis, whose farm lay on the west bank of the Menomonee River south of Blue Mound Road. At a time when some of his neighbors were experimenting with dairy cattle, farmer Freis had a different specialty: pigs. At the peak of their operation, Freis and his family kept perhaps 200 pigs on the riverbank.

The valley’s pace quickened toward the end of the century.

The Milwaukee Road (the common name for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad Company) built a massive complex of repair and supply shops downstream, near Thirty-fifth Street, in the 1880s. Factories upstream manufactured felt, asbestos, and wood products, and the breweries on the plank road continued to grow. As job opportunities multiplied, urban residents began to arrive. The first houses went up in the 1880s, and by 1910 settlement was nearly complete. The neighborhood’s pioneers built a scattering of duplexes and bungalows, but most Pigsville dwellings were modest single-families, including both cottages and Polish flats—those half-basement houses often associated with Slavic immigrants.

As the neighborhood developed, only the Freis family farm remained in operation. Their pigs gave Milwaukeeans a handy point of reference for the hamlet taking shape in the valley. The area was called “Pigstown” as early as 1894, and it was widely known as “Pigsville” by the early 1900s. An alternate spelling emerged in later years: “Piggsville.” According to a persistent local legend, an innkeeper named George Pigg operated an establishment on Blue Mound Road in pioneer days and bequeathed his name to the settlement. It is more likely, however, that Mr. Pigg was invented by local boosters who had heard a little too

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much snickering over the years and wanted some distance from their association with ham on the hoof.

Pigsville’s early residents were largely Germans, including some who had moved down the hill from nearby Merrill Park.

German Lutherans centered their lives around Apostles Church, a Wisconsin Synod congregation established near Thirty-ninth and Michigan in 1897. The church tower was a dominant Valley landmark for seventy years. In the early 1900s the Germans were joined by immigrants from the Slavic nations of eastern Europe: Slovaks, most importantly, but also Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Poles, and Russians. Like the Germans, they transplanted many of their customs and institutions. Pigsville’s Slovaks organized their own sokol, which combined gymnastics with social activities, as well as an amateur dramatic society.

Both Germans and Slavs depended on nearby industries for employment. A few residents commuted to jobs Downtown, but the vast majority worked in the Milwaukee Road shops, the Miller brewery, and other plants within easy walking distance. Although there were some skilled tradesmen in the neighborhood, most workers began on the lower rungs of the occupational ladder.

As Milwaukee expanded to the west, urban development bypassed Pigsville—or, more accurately, bridged it. Beginning in 1892, a spindly steel trestle carried streetcars across the valley on the Wells Street line. It provided a thrill for paying passengers at no extra charge until the 1950s. Spanning the Menomonee Valley bluffs, the original Wisconsin Avenue viaduct was completed in 1911 after four years of work. It was certainly the most monumental bridge built in Milwaukee before the freeway era, and its concrete arches recalled the graceful symmetry of a Roman aqueduct. In 1925 the Rapid Transit line, a high-speed electric railway, began regular service over yet another bridge just south of Pigsville.

As cars, trains, and trolleys whizzed past on three bridges overhead, the neighborhood on the riverbank was left to develop in peace and quiet. It became an unusually close-knit community, with few intruders and even fewer secrets. The neighborhood was hardly one big family; but many of its residents worked together, drank together, and worshiped together. When the neighborhood’s children reached adulthood, intermarriage was not uncommon. The lively sense of community was bolstered by local businesses. In the 1920s Pigsville boasted four grocery stores, three butcher shops, two bakeries, a plumbing business, a dry goods store, and several taverns. Nearly all the necessities of life were a short walk away.

Valley residents paid a price for their privacy. In its early decades the neighborhood was part of the rural Town of Wauwatosa. While city residents on the hilltop to the east enjoyed paved streets, indoor plumbing, and street lamps, Pigsville made do with gravel roads, backyard wells, and outhouses. Some families added to the rural atmosphere by raising chickens, geese, and even a few pigs on their small lots.

Illustration by Janice Kotowicz

The neighborhood’s rustic character remained intact until 1925, when, after years of lobbying by local residents, Milwaukee finally annexed the area and began to provide urban services.

The persistent problem of flooding was addressed in the 1930s, when federal relief workers lined the banks of the Menomonee River with Lannon-stone walls. Practically every spring until that project was completed, the river inundated much of the neighborhood. Although physical conditions gradually improved, Pigsville retained an edge-of-the-city ambience it has never really lost.

Flowing with the River There was little change in the community until after World War II, and even then the changes were less sweeping than those in nearby neighborhoods. The end of the war itself was an occasion for rejoicing. Pigsville welcomed home its sons with a lavish banquet at Apostles Church, a parade around the neighborhood, and an outdoor party that lasted into the wee hours.

In 1948 Valley Park, at Forty-second and St. Paul, opened as a war memorial. A monument to the neighborhood’s war dead still stands in the heart of the park, dedicated “By the People of the Valley.”

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major geographic barriers, historic settlement patterns, and current organizational service areas.

The list could have been significantly longer, but it is in prewar Milwaukee that the historical layers are most abundant, the cultural currents most visible, and the stories most resonant—if only because they’ve been echoing for so long.

There are genuine neighborhoods beyond my chosen borders, including nineteenth-century nodes like Granville Station or New Coeln and historic subdivisions like Morgandale or Wedgewood Park. But the postwar city tends to be largely one piece: mile after mile of Cape Cods and then ranches and split-levels, punctuated by apartment corridors and commercial strips. Even in the older part of town, some areas are so diffuse (or so diminutive) that it’s difficult to classify them as neighborhoods. Rather than force the issue, I chose to leave a few blank spots on the map.

Choosing a graphic format was significantly easier. Kotowicz’s original poster illustrations, augmented by her eleven new creations, are the visual anchors of the book. These illustrations are complemented by customized maps and a generous assortment of both historic and contemporary photographs that help bring each neighborhood to life.

It took a while but, with the sponsorship of Historic Milwaukee Inc. and the generous support of more than a dozen communityminded funders, the book was published in September 2015. The result, we hope, is an appealing hybrid between a history book and an art book that will retain its relevance as a benchmark in precisely the same way that 1930s studies prepared by Works Progress Administration retain their value today.

Milwaukee, as much as any large city in America and more than most, is marked by painful inequities in both income and opportunity. But whether a specific neighborhood narrative has led to vibrancy or pathology is not really the issue here. City of Neighborhoods reflects the obvious reality that not every community is created equal.

Yet every story has intrinsic human value. Stories from Harambee are just as important as those from North Point; Metcalfe Park stories are as valuable as those of Bay View. Just as no understanding of the city—or of America—is truly complete without an understanding of the contrasts that define our society, no vision of a more hopeful future can emerge without a sure grasp of the past.

For me, it was an undiluted pleasure to make the acquaintance of my hometown at the neighborhood level once again: to bike, to chat, to question, to photograph, and simply to witness Milwaukeeans in the act of being Milwaukeeans. Yes, there’s been change and, yes, there are problems. But there is also an undeniable richness to life in Milwaukee. Chris Winters, our lead photographer, may have said it best: “The deeper you go in the neighborhoods, the deeper they are.”

It is my hope that Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods will help readers to discover some of that depth for themselves. There may be no more dynamic human creation than the city, no more compelling expression of energy, aspiration, pain, and potential on the planet. Neighborhoods are the parts that make up the larger organism; it is in seeing our neighborhoods that we see our city whole. Z 14

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As this surge of civic spirit receded into memory, Pigsville experienced the same juggernaut of forces that transformed cities all across America. Some changes affected the neighborhood’s physical landscape. Interstate 94 was built on the community’s southern margin in the 1960s, following the old Rapid Transit right-of-way. Apostles Church merged with a Wauwatosa congregation and tore down its building in 1968. (The original school still stands on Michigan Street.) Miller Brewing expanded its physical footprint to Blue Mound Road and beyond.

Family-owned local businesses closed, one by one, until the only establishment remaining was the Valley Inn, a long-tenured tavern on Fortieth and Clybourn.

The pace of physical change accelerated toward the end of the 20th century. In 1993 the old Wisconsin Avenue Bridge was replaced by a new span that purposely mirrored the graceful arches of the original. One casualty of the $17 million project was a group of fifteen homes (and two taverns) huddled on the riverbank squarely below the viaduct. Sometimes considered the original Pigsville, the cluster was cleared during construction.

The Menomonee River itself remained an unpredictable neighbor, even with the Depression-era retaining walls in place.

A catastrophic flood in June of 1997 prompted the first control measures since the 1930s. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District built a levee on the river’s east bank and capped it with a decorative floodwall that has so far done its job admirably.

Completed in 2001, the project resulted in the loss of eighteen homes but enlarged the dimensions of Valley Park—and provided relief from the anxiety Pigsville residents felt every time the forecast called for heavy rain.

As the face of the neighborhood changed, so did its demographic profile. Following a script familiar to virtually every immigrant group, the Valley’s sons and daughters received better educations than their parents, which enabled them to land better jobs and buy nicer houses—usually outside the neighborhood. As Pigsville’s old-line residents aged, more and more of their homes began to change hands. Some were purchased by the children of residents, but not nearly enough to ensure continuity between the generations. The number of Slovak families thinned to a handful, and the community attracted genuine newcomers: African Americans, a variety of working-class whites, Latinos, and a scattering of gay couples.

Year by year, the neighborhood looked more and more like the rest of Milwaukee.

At the same time, it continued to look like the only Pigsville in the world. Although change has come to the Valley in recent years, the community has been touched relatively lightly by trends that have remade other sections of the city. Newcomers generally find that they’ve landed in a genuine enclave, one with definite expectations and strong traditions. Pride in property is perhaps the most visible. Many Valley homes are well past the century mark, but their owners have kept them up-to-date over the years. It is not unusual to see repair and remodeling projects underway in the dead of winter. During the warm months many backyards are lush with flowerbeds, vegetable gardens, and grapevines.

Milwaukee County H

“Pigsville” is from Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, by John Gurda.

Published 2015 by Historic Milwaukee Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.

Above: Completed in 1911, the Wisconsin Avenue viaduct put a roof hill overfrom Pigsville and allowed to develop in peace andBoth quiet.Germans and the nearby Merrillit Park.

German

Lutherans centered their lives around Apostles Church, a Wisconsin Synod congregation established near Thirty-ninth and Michigan in 1897. The church tower was a dominant Valley landmark for seventy years. In the early 1900s the Germans were joined by immigrants from the Slavic nations of eastern Europe: Slovaks, most importantly, but also Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Poles, and Russians.

Like the Germans, they transplanted many of their customs and institutions. Pigsville’s Slovaks organized their own sokol, which combined gymnastics with social activities, as well as an amateur dramatic society.

nearby industries for em idents commuted to jobs vast majority worked in shops, the Miller brewe within easy walking dist were some skilled trades hood, most workers bega of the occupational ladde As Milwaukee expande development bypassed accurately, bridged it. B spindly steel trestle carr the valley on the Wells S ed a thrill for paying pa Photo credit: Christopher Winters

The neighborhood’s strong sense of place is reinforced by its geography. Pigsville is not on the way to anywhere. Although it lies at the heart of the city, barely two miles west of Downtown, the neighborhood is cut off from the rest of Milwaukee by some imposing barriers: Interstate 94 to the south, the MillerCoors brewery complex to the north, and fairly steep bluffs to the east and west. Of the eleven streets that serve the Valley, no fewer than seven terminate in dead ends. Most people who enter the neighborhood are residents—or lost.

Pigsville’s location, off every beaten path, has enabled the neighborhood to maintain its traditions with a good deal of integrity. The Valley Park Civic Association, successor to a group organized in 1925, stands ready to resist any threats to the community’s stability. The Valley Inn, now in its fourth generation of family ownership, remains a classic neighborhood bar in a classic neighborhood. Fishermen (and some fisherwomen) still angle for salmon in the Menomonee River during the fall spawning run. After subtractions for flood control and bridge construction projects, there are fewer than 150 houses in Pigsville proper—the blocks between the river and Thirty-ninth Street—but residents continue to engage in good-natured debate about the origin, and even the spelling, of their community’s name.

In such a small neighborhood, small things are noticed—a sagging porch here, a “For Sale” sign there—and the potential for disruption by physical or demographic changes is high. But many newcomers seem to appreciate Pigsville’s island-like atmosphere.

They point to its affordable housing, its strong sense of identity, the green space of Valley Park, the little-known sled run on Indian Hill (at the top of Thirty-ninth Street), and the general absence of traffic as appealing assets. One young father put it simply: “It’s peaceful down here.”

Pigsville is not the neighborhood that time forgot, but it remains a special part of the city. The community is unique and, whatever the future brings, it will undoubtedly remain a place unto itself for years to come.

Photo credit: Milwaukee County Parks Department

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Above: A newer Wisconsin Avenue viaduct carries traffic over Pigsville, but Blue Mound Road (foreground) still descends to the valley floor.

CONNECT: MILWAUKEE: CITY OF NEIGHBORHOODS, by John Gurda Published by Historic Milwaukee Inc., this 466-page book is the most comprehensive account of grassroots Milwaukee ever published. Based on a popular series of posters published by the City of Milwaukee in the 1980s, the book features both historical chronicles and contemporary portraits of 37 neighborhoods that emerged before World War II, an ensemble that defines the historic heart of the city. The book also features 11 new neighborhood posters by artist Jan Kotowicz, who created the original series. Visit historicmilwaukee.org for more information.

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BIG CHEESE locally-sourced milk and eco-friendly practices MAKE CEdAR GROVE CHEESE A WINNER

B Y S HEL B Y D EER I N G

O

n the outskirts of Plain, Wisconsin, a small town of around 800 that lies less than an hour from Madison, stands a nondescript white brick building surrounded by farmland. From the outside, the Cedar Grove Cheese factory

looks exactly like the numerous cheese plants found most everywhere throughout our fair state. A sign out front proclaims daily tours; tanker trucks deliver the latest batches of fresh milk; and of course, an American flag waves alongside a Wisconsin flag.

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Photo credits: Shelby Deering/ Cedar Grove Cheese/Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board

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Above: To make cheese, you start with milk, than add rennet. Rennet is an enzyme which makes the milk coagulate into curds. This leaves the watery whey as a byproduct to be drained off. The curds are cut and pressed into blocks, removing more moisture. Finally, there is a bacteriological process known as “ripening,” aging at a particular temperature and humidity. Then the cheese is ready for sale.

But there are aspects of Cedar Grove Cheese that make it stand out from the rest of the pack. The plant produces 12,000 pounds of cheese every day, and all of it is sourced from around forty family-owned local farms. Seventy percent of the cheese is produced with organic ingredients, and, as of 1993, Cedar Grove became the first cheese producer in the country to ensure that all of its products are rBGH-free (rBGH is a genetically engineered variant of the natural growth hormone produced by cows that some farms use to boost milk production.).

While their commitment to sustainable farming practices is notable, the factory has embraced sustainability itself through a revolutionary system called the Living Machine. An on-site greenhouse that uses plants to clean and purify wastewater, the Living Machine works to minimize the environmental footprint of the factory.

The person behind all of this innovation is Bob Wills, owner of Cedar Grove Cheese. A former teacher and researcher in

the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wills is one of only fifty master cheesemakers in the state of Wisconsin. The Master Cheesemaker Program, the only one in the U.S., is an advanced education program at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research.

Established by the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, UW Extension, and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the program enhances the international visibility of what is already the nation’s premier cheesemaking state and shines a light on the unparalleled standards of Wisconsin cheesemaking.

Though he became a master cheesemaker in 2010, Wills has been involved with Cedar Grove since 1989. He is quick to point out that the factory, the first of its kind in the western part of the state, has been making cheese since 1878.

Wills says, “I think I always knew that I needed to be an entrepreneur and own a business. And this was a good one. It was a nice business to get into.”

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Photo credit: Cedar Grove Cheese

Photo credit: Cedar Grove Cheese

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Above (l to r): Cedar Grove Cheese owner Bob Wills poses next to 2,600-gallon treatment tank inside the Living Machine. Housed in a greenhouse adjacent to the Cedar Grove Cheese factory, the Living Machine is designed to be a working ecosystem that uses natural microbes and a collection of hydroponic plants to treat wastewater from the cheesemaking process. It takes about three or four days for the Living Machine to clean wastewater for discharge into nearby Honey Creek.

Cedar Grove has found success producing Wisconsin standards such as cheese curds and cheddars. Wills says that the factory has been known to churn out up to 26,000 pounds of cheese curds in one week.

But Cedar Grove truly shines when it comes to specialty cheeses. Wills and his team started working with individual producers to make specialties for them, which later turned into the company’s bread and butter.

“We did some grass-based cheeses for a couple of dairy co-ops, such as Northern Meadows. And then we started doing a lot of sheep milk cheese for the Wisconsin Sheep Dairy Cooperative. Those cheeses won a lot of awards. So we’re doing a lot of sheep milk, goat milk, and water buffalo cheeses,” says Wills.

Perhaps one of their best-known cheeses is Weird Sisters, an aged, surface-ripened cheese that’s a combination of waterbuffalo milk and cow’s milk. A pure, white cheese with a fresh yet creamy flavor, Weird Sisters has won many awards.

Wills explains that the cheese is named after the witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a nod to the factory’s proximity to American Players Theatre in Spring Green. Cedar Grove produces several other cheeses that are named after Shakespearean characters: Montague (a mild sheep-cow milk blend), Banquo (a Pyrenees-style sheep-milk cheese), and Fleance (a sheep-milk cheese similar to Spanish Manchego).

Wills and Cedar Grove Cheese have also reaped accolades for their organic line, which includes a tangy eight-year-old cheddar rarely found among organic cheese.

Although the factory can point to achievements like producing excellent organic cheeses and dreaming up new specialty batches, Cedar Grove also prides itself on being completely rBGH-free.

Cheese that is produced with milk that is rBGH-free is considered by many to be better for one’s health. But Wills 18

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says that the company’s decision to use rBGH-free milk was influenced by wanting to stay true to cheesemaking traditions and to satisfy their customers.

“When I was at the university, I worked on a study about the basics of rBGH,” says Wills. “We concluded that dairy farmers were basically being hurt [economically] by the introduction of stuff that increased the milk supply.

Consumers didn’t want it, and our producers didn’t want to lose customers.”

Cedar Grove has worked with many of the same milk producers since Wills took over in 1989. When many other milking operations began implementing a regimen of injecting their cows with rBGH in the 1990s, Cedar Grove and its producers agreed that their milk would be free of such additives, honoring the history and purity of cheesemaking.

“For a while, we were working with a fairly large farm,” notes Wills. However, there were elements lacking in the large farm’s milk “such as the seasonal characteristics or antioxidants” found in milk from smaller or rotational grazing operations.

Too, if the farm closed or milk was somehow compromised, Wills says Cedar Grove would be at risk to lose 25% of their annual milk supply. “That would be hard on our customers— and on us.”

“It works for smaller plants to pair up with smaller farms because both of them become significant to each other,” says Wills, pointing to the forty family-owned farms from which Cedar Grove sources their milk. All in close proximity to the cheese factory (most no further than Sauk City, Reedsburg, or Richland Center), these farms generally have small herds of eighty or so cows.

Wills says that “there isn’t enough organic milk in this area for what we need,” so the farthest they travel for milk is to a cluster of organic farms in the Darlington area. Wills also likes

Photo credit: Cedar Grove Cheese

Photo credit: Cedar Grove Cheese

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Above (l to r): The Living Machine is able to remove 99% of the biological oxygen demand, 98% of the suspended solids, 93% of total nitrogen, and 57% of phosphorus. Starting inside closed aerobic tanks, where bacteria and other tiny organisms begin to break down the residues and particles, the water flows next to tanks with wetland plants, whose roots provide a new ecosystem for more diverse microbial populations. The plants also use the nutrients in the water to grow. After this process, the solids are allowed to settle and then removed.

to source locally because it helps keep transport vehicle emissions to a minimum, which reflects Cedar Grove’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

The cheesemaker/farmer compact that Cedar Grove has developed over the years is a model for sustainable production. But perhaps what makes Cedar Grove truly unique is its ingenious Living Machine, an in-factory system that cleans wastewater before it goes back into the ground. Implemented sixteen years ago, the Living Machine was in operation long before being environmentally-friendly was a selling point for products.

The Living Machine is essentially a greenhouse next to the cheese factory containing a series of ten 2,600-gallon tanks.

Wastewater flows from tank to tank, each of which contains collections of wetland plants. The plants absorb and filter out wastewater nutrients, while bacterial colonies that live in the tanks remove soaps and caustic cleaners as well as any remaining whey, milk, and bits of cheese.

“We [have] to clean the trucks that come in, the tanks, the pipelines, the pasteurizer, the vats, and the floors and walls.

Everything is washed down. And in the process of that, we use around 8,000 gallons of water a day,” Wills explains. Into the Living Machine goes the “really dirty water that has whey, milk from the cheesemaking process, and cleaning chemicals, [stuff] we can’t just put that into nature without killing off the fish or whatever is out there.”

At the end of the three-day process, water processed by the Living Machine is clean enough to release into nearby Honey Creek, keeping the watershed clean and mitigating the impact of their manufacturing process.

“The goal is to have the water stay here,” says Wills, “but the main thing is to not put stuff out there that will damage the environment.”

The Living Machine is one of the only systems of its kind in the United States. Wills knows of a similar system at a cheese factory in Québec, Canada, and there is one in the Everglades.

Wills says that the Missouri Department of Transportation even came to Cedar Grove to study the Living Machine, so they could build one at their headquarters in Jefferson City.

Since Cedar Grove is unique in its practices, many aspiring cheesemakers train or intern at Cedar Grove to learn their craft.

“We want to make the best-quality, safest product on the market. We want to support our farmer suppliers and our employees and the environment. And we want to be collaborative,” says Wills, noting how Cedar Grove helps others to develop their own cheese businesses. “We end up benefiting by growing along with them,” he says.

Many of these cheesemakers don’t have their own facility, so Cedar Grove shares the space with them. Certain producers, such as Chris Roelli of Shullsburg’s Roelli Cheese Haus and Andy Hatch of Dodgeville’s Uplands Cheese, use the facility and at times even train others.

“We give an equal opportunity to new artisan cheesemakers who need to get their hours in to become licensed. They’ll come in and do internships with us and get their training so they can start their own businesses,” says Wills.

Wills says that these interactions really help him to grow as a master cheesemaker.

“Every time I bring somebody new in here, and he or she is working on something that I can’t replicate, I’m going to learn a lot more about cheesemaking and be a better cheesemaker at the end of the process.” Z

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Photo credit: Jon Shelton

Photo credit: James P. Leary

ShopTalk Sparking a Conversation on Working Life

by D e n a W o r t z e l

L

ooking closer at the photo, I couldn’t tell if the expression of the woman dressed in white in the out-of-focus selfie was sad or ironic, or just indecipherable. Sue had been a medical transcriptionist for 32 years at a clinic in Menomonee Falls. But at the time she sent me her

photo, Sue’s workplace had become a room in her home.

When the clinic forced her to telecommute, she lost an office that she described as full of the chitchat of co-workers, a place where she fondly recalls “getting a medical education free of charge.” Instead, she spent her eight-hour workday alone.

“I felt ugly because I worked in pajamas. … My work buddies were my pet birds,” she wrote. Two weeks after I met Sue, she wrote back to say she had been let go from the clinic. Her work had been taken over by the machine that some doctors already assumed she was when they stopped hearing her voice at the clinic, stopped seeing her face.

With so much positive buzz about how the Internet and digital technology are changing the nature of work, I got to wondering how many Wisconsin work lives look like Sue’s.

I asked Jon Shelton, a labor historian at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, what history can tell us about the ways in which we view work and workers in America—and how what we believe about work compares to the underlying realities.

“Since the 1970s,” says Shelton, “most Wisconsinites—and the majority of Americans—have seen real wages and salaries decline and job protections erode.”

According to Shelton, another sea change in the labor landscape is how, in just the past couple of decades, many employers are finding new ways to shift their costs onto their employees. Shelton’s point reminded me of Sue’s description of how her former office in the clinic is now being used for patient

Above (l to r): Labor historian Jon Shelton discusses the shifting landscape of work in America with his UWGB class. Folklorist James P. Leary at work at The Blue Hills Foundry, a mom and pop industrial operation in Rice Lake. The first-ever female sportscaster Jessie Garcia shakes hands with Green Bay Packers coach Mike Holmgren. On August 15, 1966, Jesus Salas lead 23 marchers on an eight-day journey from Wautoma to Madison to demand fair wages, assistance with housing, and other basic needs for migrant workers in Wisconsin.

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Photo credit: Jessie Garcia

visits. It had not occurred to me that Sue was being made to bear the cost of providing her own workspace.

Sue is not alone in her predicament. Shelton notes that many employers are hiring workers as “independent contractors” instead of as traditional employees as a way to lower labor costs and save money on benefits. The number of workers now classified as independent contractors has skyrocketed in the past few years, and Shelton predicts that trend will continue.

While some argue that independent contractor status offers employees more flexibility with working hours, this comes at a cost for contractors at companies like Uber, whose model requires that drivers pay for their own cars, maintenance and insurance, and even fuel.

“Uber has been very controversial, because some argue that it is a positive workaround to traditional taxi services,” Shelton says. But “the reality, in my view, is that Uber’s main source of innovation is dramatically lowering labor costs by shifting its costs onto its ‘contractors.’” Like many other independent contractors, Uber drivers also have no workers’ compensation on which to rely if hurt on the job, or unemployment benefits if laid off.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, anxiety over technological innovation and worker obsolescence has been part of the conversation surrounding working life. However, workers in Wisconsin enjoy certain opportunities and face particular challenges.

According to a 2014 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report by Kevin Crowe and John Schmid on the state job landscape, manufacturing is one of the few areas where Wisconsin has outperformed the nation in terms of job growth: “Although manufacturing wages have stagnated, they remain considerably higher on average than the pay for service sectors including hospitality (such as restaurant workers) and retailers (such as cashiers) that have provided the sharpest increases in U.S. jobs during the current economic recovery.”

Photo credit: Jesus Salas

However, note Crowe and Schmid, “Wisconsin continues to play catch-up in technology and professional services, sectors that have spawned pockets of innovation around the country and produced some of the most promising and high-paying jobs of the future.”

It seems that the national shift from a manufacturing- to service-based economy has yet to curtail this fading bright spot in an otherwise dim employment outlook. In recent years, overall job growth in Wisconsin has lagged behind the national average, and 27% of the state’s workers earn poverty-level wages (around $11.00 per hour).

Shelton attributes the decline of good-paying jobs in the U.S. and in Wisconsin to policy-level erosion of worker protections such as collective bargaining. He expects the situation to get worse in Wisconsin as a consequence of the “right to work” legislation that became law last year.

Explanations rooted in statistics and policy paint a backdrop for why work is changing. But stories like Sue’s connect us to the experience of work today. Yet we rarely take the time to have a conversation about our assumptions about—and attitudes toward—an endeavor that takes up over half our waking hours.

“It seems that too many in our state know too little about the nitty gritty tasks and challenges bound up with the labor of their fellow citizens. We need to know more about our respective working lives. We need to talk about why some jobs are publicly valued while others are derided or disregarded,” says Jim Leary, a folklorist who studies the cultures of working people in Wisconsin.

The work we do—both paid and unpaid, both public and private sector—defines us, and, all too often, divides us. In an effort to create some deeper conversation around work in Wisconsin, Leary, Shelton, and other scholars, journalists, laborers, and business owners will be leading public discussions through ShopTalk, a newly launched program of the Wisconsin Humanities Council that explores the lives of Wisconsin workers.

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By creating spaces to explore what work is really like, ShopTalk hopes to break down divisions and improve the quality of public dialogue, with implications for policy and the workplace alike.

Jessie Garcia, who works as a television sportscaster, will share with ShopTalk participants her struggles in balancing work and mothering.

“There are days I have so many balls in the air,” says Garcia.

“I will be running from work to home, starting dinner, helping kids with homework, trying to change into a sweatshirt, answering the phone, unloading the dishwasher and thinking about whatever project is on my plate for the next day. This doesn’t make me unique. It makes me an adult. Women—and men—are pushed from many sides but women often do the brunt of the scheduling for kids, planning meals, and just basically running a household.”

Garcia, like Leary, hopes the ShopTalk program will provoke more meaningful exchanges about the realities of work today.

“I just want to open conversations with Wisconsin women about life in the trenches and how to find our own personal satisfaction.”

And it is in the spirit of open conversation that ShopTalk is reaching out to men and women across the state to host their own discussion on the changing nature of work. As local organizations host ShopTalk events—anyone can host one—with Garcia and other presenters (see sidebar for complete list), people from all walks of life will have a chance to share their stories and ideas. To establish a focus on the human experience of work, presenters will include personal stories from their lives in their talks, and invite their audiences to share stories from their working lives in response, so as to build discussion around concrete experiences.

“I have made some decisions in my life that surprised people and perhaps weren’t the ‘expected’ path and I have learned a great deal from my experiences. I want to share my story and hear other peoples’. I envision lively, open conversations that go deep and leave us all feeling more connected,” says Garcia.

Making connections is central to any good storytelling.

Former farmworker and labor union organizer Jesus Salas knows the power of rendering portraits of migrant workers’ lives through stories. Salas, a child worker when his family began travelling seasonally between Texas and Wisconsin in the 1940s, went on to found and lead Obreros Unidos, an independent agricultural labor union.

For the ShopTalk conversations he leads, Salas has stories that only he can tell, such as how an organized march from Wautoma in the Central Sands vegetable-growing region to Madison changed Wisconsin history.

“Nowadays I see more divided opinions than commonlyheld understandings about who is or isn’t a Wisconsinite, and about what does or doesn’t count as worthwhile work,” says Leary. The Wisconsin Humanities Council created ShopTalk to draw people out of their separate lives, to come together and examine their divisions and work toward a better understanding of one another. Z

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Host a ShopTalk in Your Town As part of the Working Lives Project, the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s ongoing initiative exploring the meaning and reality of work in Wisconsin, the WHC is working with communities across the state to host ShopTalk events. Here’s how it works:

Pick Your Talk Wisconsin groups are eligible to host two free ShopTalk events per calendar year. Choose a theme that fits the interests of your potential audience. ShopTalk’s 40+ topics have been sorted into three themes to make choosing easier. Working People: Life Paths, Work in Context: The Big Picture, and Pulitzer Winners: Reporting for a Living.

Contact a Presenter The ShopTalk website makes it easy to directly contact a ShopTalk presenter via e-mail to plan an event. See the list of presenters below.

Book a ShopTalk Event Once you have agreed on an event date, time, and format with the ShopTalk presenter, fill out the online application form. Applications must be received by the Wisconsin Humanities Council at least six weeks in advance of your event. Your application will be reviewed within two weeks.

2016 ShopTalk Speakers Alan Anderson Arnold Chevalier Danielle Dresden Kisa Fields Kathleen Gallagher Jesse Gant Jessie Garcia Michael Gordon Maysee Herr Anne Horjus Mark Johnson James Leary Aims McGuinness

Rachel Monaco-Wilcox Ruth Olson Donna Peckett Tami Plourde Gary Porter Jesus Salas Corey Saffold Katherine Sanders Jonathan Shelton Alison Sherwood Alison Staudinger Jodi Vandenberg-Daves Mark Wagler

Visit wisconsinhumanities.org/shoptalk for more information or to choose your talk.

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The science Behind THE FIRST Species-specific COMPOSITION

by J acob T u r n e r

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oes your pet like music? The answer is: Yes. But not your music.

Don’t worry. It’s not personal. Our companion animals, domesticated thousands of years ago, are descended from primarily nocturnal predators. Over millions of years they

developed an acute sense of hearing in order to find prey in the dark.

Cats and dogs have a much sharper sensitivity to sound than humans. The eighteen muscles in a dog’s ear let it precisely locate the origin of a sound, as do the thirtytwo muscles of a cat’s ear. While dogs can hear up to an octave and a half higher than humans, cats hear up to an octave higher than a dog. With even more sensitive hearing than dogs, cats can detect the tiniest variations in sound; if a mouse rustles in a bush thirty feet away, the cat knows exactly what’s for lunch.

So while it is fun to imagine that our pets break into dance to “Tabby’s Mix” on the iPod moments after we leave for work, cats and dogs don’t really care for rock, reggae, or even classical. For them, human music is more like a drop in an ocean of noise that continually floods their senses on a daily basis.

It’s tricky to say whether or not music as we know it even exists for our pets. After all, music is a human construction.

While some species—birds and whales, for instance—have their own “songs,” these are really more a function of communication than artistic expression. Yet these songs have the

capacity to elicit an emotional response from both human and animal alike.

Composer David Teie has always had a deep curiosity about why humans respond to music. During his twenty-year career playing cello with the National Symphony Orchestra, Teie developed what he calls a “universal theory of music,” which suggests that our emotional connection to music is a response to a coordinated remix of sounds we learn in the womb.

Everyone has songs they love, but there’s really no scientifically based answer as to why we do. According to Teie’s theory, we are relaxed by music that shares a rhythm with our mother’s resting heartbeat, and we tend to prefer instruments—like the violin—that play around the pitch of her voice.

To expand his universal theory of music to include the animal world, in 2009 Teie reached out to Charles Snowdon, a primatologist and professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Snowdon supplied Teie with recordings from a colony of cotton-top tamarins (squirrel-sized monkeys) housed in the UW’s Department of Psychology. Some of the

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Above: Emeritus professor of psychology Charles Snowdon at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

recordings captured calls of distress made by tamarins during veterinary appointments. Other samples included chirps made by contented tamarins; fast and frantic to the human ear, but obviously reassuring to their own.

By employing such compositional techniques as pitch and tempo, Teie turned the assortment of calls into songs with melody and rhythm that he felt would lead to either distressed or contented states in the tamarins. Teie brought the two finished tamarin-based songs to Snowdon’s lab and played them for the colony along with two other human-based songs designed to elicit similar responses in humans.

As hypothesized, the music designed from the friendly tamarin calls led to more affiliation-based behavior, while the music designed from calls of distress induced a state of fear in listeners. But only in the case of songs designed from tamarin sounds. The human music elicited little response.

The tamarin songs became the first example of speciesspecific music, a term coined by Teie that same year, that refers to specially designed compositions that incorporate the pitches, tones and tempos familiar to any particular species.

Named one of the best ideas of 2009 by the New York Times Magazine, Teie and Snowdon’s species-specific music was met with a flurry of press attention and a public eager to share anecdotes about the kind of music their pets like to hear.

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But Teie and Snowdon had to gently remind fans of their research not to anthropomorphize their work. “A reporter for National Public Radio is convinced his dog likes classical, so he puts on NPR all day,” says Snowdon. “A guy from a rock station thought his dog liked heavy metal, so he put that on all day.

There is a lot of silly stuff going on. We don’t yet know, for most cases, what the effects of music are on animals.”

The enthusiastic response got Teie and Snowdon thinking about how they might expand their species-specific music research and about the commercial implications of this expansion.

While zookeepers and research centers might be interested in species-specific music enrichment as a practical tool for calming or entertaining wild animals in captivity, millions of Americans keep an animal for companionship. The American Pet Products Association estimates that 65% of households in the United States shelter around 164 million cats and dogs, not to mention the less frequent extent to which pet owners provide food and homes for birds, fish, reptiles, rodents, amphibians, and the occasional exotic animal.

Americans spent more than $60 billion on their pets in 2015.

While more than $50 billion goes to such necessary supplies as food and medicine, many pets find themselves on the receiving end of increasingly diverse and technologically-sophisticated

Photo credit: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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Above: A cat-added composite photo of Music for Cats composer David Teie in his Bethesda, Maryland, home.

products. In a world where humans can use GPS to monitor a pet’s location (Tagg Tracker, $100), precisely schedule and measure mealtimes (Petnet SmartFeeder, $149), and even video conference with Rex from afar (PetChatz, $349), it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to see the market for pet music.

Any inquiry into animal musicality asks for a diversity of perspective: imagining what life is like not only for other humans, but for other life forms as well, and along the way working towards a better understanding of both.

There is a difference between thinking of animals as humans and recognizing the similarities we share across species. For example, we do not actually cut them off a square of lasagna at the dinner table, but we do feed pets when they are hungry. We do not take pets to our family physician, but we do take them to their own doctor extensively trained in their unique biology.

Even though pets have a different body, they still eat food and get sick, just like we do.

The fact that this distinction is not as clear for musical preference demonstrates just how little is known about the nature of music itself and how it operates in the human brain. But that’s not for lack of effort. Animal music has been a topic of interest for caretakers and researchers alike for decades.

The bored animal in captivity will seek its own stimulation, as colorfully illustrated by an octopus at the Santa Monica

Pier Aquarium who broke a valve in its tank and flooded the building because it was something to do. The pet owner who comes home to find a broken vase and the cat blaming the dog knows this problem too well.

However, inconsistent results have discouraged the field from advancing. For example, one study suggests that chimpanzees display less aggressive behavior in response to music, but then another says music does not work for horses. One study says that soundtracks of outdoor “nature sounds” are just as good as music for gorillas, and the other says they are not.

Researchers have even studied the effects of music on fish, but have found only contradictory conclusions.

Of course, it is only by asking questions that we learn which further questions to ask. Or that we are asking the wrong questions. Researchers in Japan played a Mozart concerto for rats and found that, for the most part, the rats could not even hear it.

This is because rats do not pick up on frequencies below 4,000 hertz (Hz), the level around which most human music is found.

Teie and Snowdon broke open the frustratingly complicated mystery of animal music by addressing two central flaws in most studies. As Snowdon points out, when it comes to human music, animals simply “don’t hear it, and it’s not music to them.”

While the tamarin study offered clearer direction for further research in captive animal enrichment, Teie and Snowdon

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teamed up again in 2014, along with then-undergraduate student Megan Savage, to study the effects of species-specific music for companion animals. Although cats and dogs each come in a variety of breeds, the relatively small difference in size between cat breeds made for a more precise experiment in the lab—the subjects being less likely than dogs to be affected by potential differences in auditory sensitivity.

For this study, Teie composed music he hoped the cats would find interesting and pleasant. Kittens are born deaf, so their sense of sound comes from the world around them. They learn rhythm as their ears perk up to chirping birds, suckling siblings, and the purring of fellow cats, including their mother.

Cats also vocalize an octave higher than humans, and their calls more often than humans include sliding frequencies.

In the quest to make species-specific music for cats, “we are not actually replicating cat sounds,” says Snowdon. “We are trying to create a music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats.”

Therefore, the music itself has to appeal to the auditory perception of another species beyond the basic communication of vocal signals. A distress call only means so much to an animal, and our mother’s heartbeat alone offers quite a different experience than a song with a beat.

Music’s ability to communicate an emotion facilitates social cohesion and coordination of behavior, an adaptive function especially useful for a social species like humans. Music also increases cognitive skills and even offers beneficial physiological effects and positive neurochemical changes.

While animals, as far as we know, cannot themselves arrange their own songs, the evolutionary benefits of music could address similar needs for them.

To test their species-specific cat songs, Snowdon and Savage brought a laptop and two speakers to the homes of 47 cats and played them each four compositions: two songs composed for cats and two for humans as a control. “Cozmo’s Air,” a cat song, used the tempo of purring, 1380 beats per minute, with melodic sliding frequencies covering 44% of the sample.

“Rusty’s Ballad,” another cat song, used suckling as a tempo, with 55% melodic sliding frequencies. The average pitch of the cat songs was about two octaves higher (1.34kHz) than the classical music (335Hz) Snowdon and Savage used as a control. The human music also carried a significantly slower tempo, less than 70 beats per minute, with little to no sliding frequencies.

The researchers measured two types of behavior: avoidant/ fearful, and orient/approach. Avoidant/fearful behaviors

included leaving the room, hissing at the speaker, and arched backs. Orient/approach behaviors included purring, getting close to the speaker, and scenting the speaker by rubbing against it.

Cats exhibited eight aversive responses to cat music and nine to human music out of 94 total tests with each type of music; but the overall average of positive responses to cat music was 1.5 per cat, or 141 total positive responses.

On average, the cats responded positively to the cat music in half the time it took for them to display any positive behavior towards the human music. The study concluded that domestic cats do indeed express interest in and responsiveness towards music composed of species-specific elements.

The researchers again found that media outlets were intrigued. One headline read: Cats dance to their own beat!

However, they also heard reports from a number of humans who have successfully used “Cozmo’s Air” or “Rusty’s Ballad” to welcome new cats off the streets and into their homes. Cat music might also become a useful therapeutic tool for separation anxiety, loneliness, and grief, experiences often thought of as exclusively reserved for humans.

Most of us make good decisions on behalf of our pets to help them live happy, healthy lives. We use our own life experience to fill in the gaps.

There’s no way to directly ask them what they need.

This is where science can fill in the blank. Music in particular opens up a line of communication between humans and animals, a useful tool for the caretaker in solving the problems associated with the welfare of another species. With more research, speciesspecific music can be developed to influence important, yet traditionally difficult-to-manage animal behaviors.

Since the success of his second species-specific experiment with Snowdon, Teie has begun and completed a Kickstarter campaign for $20,000 in support of the creation of the firstever cat music album. In November 2015, 10,000 backers helped Teie exceed his goal by over $220,000. Teie’s website, musicforcats.com, today features the fruits of his work with Snowdon and subsequent Kickstarter campaign: the first-ever scientifically-backed musical compositions for cats, downloadable as singles or as an entire album.

Indeed, Music for Cats became a success by using the scientific method to solve a specific problem, but it also sets a good example for what research can do. The study of animal musicality represents an exercise in benevolent curiosity, seeking not only to understand more about the natural world, but to make all life better. Z

In the quest to make species-specific music for cats, “we are not actually replicating cat sounds,” says Snowdon. “We are trying to create a music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats.

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Turning on the Lights

How Poetry Can Change the World

by LISA VIHOS

Poetry is not revolution, but a way of learning why it must come.

—Adrienne Rich In the summer of 2015, I traveled to Salerno, Italy, for the inaugural conference of 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100TPC). Eighty poet-organizers came from across the globe—Egypt, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, and the U.S.— to share experiences, learn from each other, and discuss how to better employ poetry as a catalyst for positive change in a troubled world.

California poets Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion began 100TPC in March of 2011 as a way to bring together “poets, musicians, and artists around the USA and across the planet in a

demonstration/celebration to promote peace and sustainability.” They called for “serious social, environmental, and political change,” and put forth the idea that poetry can play a unique role as both organizer and messenger for social change.

Their message resonated with me during that difficult winter of 2011 when our state was gripped by a deep cultural divisiveness and rancorous political discussion. I signed on to 100TPC to start my own chapter in Sheboygan. Every September since 2011, with support from Mead Public Library, I.D.E.A.S. Academy, North High School, and a team

of local and regional poets, our Sheboygan chapter has offered an open mic reading for anyone who wants to add their voice to the movement for social change.

Every year the audience has gotten a little bigger—we’ve gone from 20 people to more than 85 in our five years—while participation in 100TPC worldwide has grown over time to include over 600 communities in more than a hundred countries. My goal with the Sheboygan event has always been simple: to invite people of all ages and all walks of life to come together—poets and listeners alike—to share their thoughts about the world, to become aware that poetry does

Top row (l to r): International poets in Salerno, Italy at 100TPC World Conference, 2015. Dalinee Vang, high school student at 100TPC Sheboygan, 2015. Fabu Carter, surrounded by elementary students, during an artist residency at Falk Elementary, 2014.

Bottom row (l to r): Rob Ganson reads poetry weaponized by water during the run up to the proposed Penokee Hills Mine. The view from the stage at BONK! in Racine. Kwabena Antoine Nixon at a reading in Milwaukee.

Photo credits: (top row) Lisa Vihos / Lisa Vihos / Fabu Carter (bottom row) Rob Ganson / Nick Demske / Kwabena Antoine Nixon

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have something to say to us, to learn why poetry matters.

In Italy I met poets who use video, publication, performance, education, social media, and other vehicles to get poetry out into the world. My 100TPC colleagues and I ate lots of pasta, had lengthy discussions about the oral tradition, and walked the streets of Salerno reciting poems. The experience was both educational and inspiring.

Having bonded with so many amazing poets so far from home, I vowed that I would return to Wisconsin and do more to reach out to my 100TPC cohorts here.

In so doing, I have learned that, while not everyone works under the name “100 Thousand Poets for Change” or considers their poetry to be activist in nature, poets across the state are using their words to light the way to a more peaceful, just, and sustainable Wisconsin and world.

I write to encourage, inspire, and remind.

—Fabu Carter, Madison In my conversations and e-mail exchanges with Wisconsin poets, I learned that those who seek change through poetry take many different approaches. In addition to producing their own work, some poets teach, some start collectives or reading series, some publish the work of others, some bring poems onto busses or into common council meetings. In Wisconsin, there are poets addressing particular, targeted issues, and some are working more broadly to give voice to the voiceless.

Why use poetry to bring about social change? Can poetry really succeed at such an endeavor?

Since 2012, co-Poets Laureate of Madison Wendy Vardaman and Sarah Busse have been leading a series called Poetry at Common Council Meetings.

[Editor’s note: As of January 2016 the Poet Laureate of Madison is Oscar Mireles.]

The series carves out time at quarterly city council meetings for local poets to share poems and invite reflection and discussion among council members.

According to Vardaman, the series can help city alders “understand policy in

human terms, not just [through] numbers and ordinances.”

The series draws on the power of poetry to bring to our attention situations, places, and relationships with awakened, enlightened eyes. Unlike a speech or testimony, poetry operates on another plane of discourse, employing metaphor to reach beyond what is expected, revealing the familiar in new and startling ways.

If politicians twist words, then perhaps poets untwist them. Poets unravel the mysteries of words into many possible truths. Poets look for paths out of the darkness and transport the listener or the reader into unexpected places.

“Poetry is a vital part of a life lived leaning toward another light,” says Wisconsin’s current poet laureate Kim Blaeser, “a different vision of how to be in the world. Humbly, as I place myself among those who seek justice, equality, a sustainable relationship to our planet— those who seek change, I hold up my own small lamp of assembled words and images.”

Appleton poets Sarah Gilbert and Cathryn Cofell organize the Copper Rock Café reading series, where local poets share work that shines light on tough themes such as gender issues, dealing with a disability or cancer, or post-traumatic stress. “The safe space of readings and the exposure to many poets helps people write and share poems about difficult topics,” Sarah says. “Poetry can help change by connecting people, and by building empathy.”

Author and poet Fabu Carter has been instrumental in connecting people around poetry for years. “I write to encourage, inspire, and remind,” says Carter. The former Poet Laureate of Madison (2008– 2011), Carter is also founder of The Hibiscus Collective (for multi-ethnic women) and A Place at the Table (for women artists seeking to have their voices heard in the world). Over the years she has encouraged marginalized populations to express concerns through poetry for issues that remain largely unaddressed, from the increase in prison populations to repeated instances of police brutality.

Carter says that she believes that “other voices will join in promoting peace, justice, and respect for all life when poets

understand that these topics are not ‘less than’ other subjects for poetry.”

I love to hear a young person say, “I saw this poet and it changed my life.”

—Angie Trudell Vasquez, Milwaukee In order to convey messages of change to broader audiences, poets need not only ensure that more people are listening, they must also encourage more voices to contribute the song. Many poets are doing just this by creating new avenues for people who might never before have thought of themselves as poets.

Peggy Rozga is a poet in Milwaukee who has been a social justice activist since 1965. In 2014, Rozga took a group of students from several Milwaukee public middle and high schools to the 50th anniversary conference of the Freedom Summer (the June 1964 campaign to register African-American voters in Mississippi). She led the students in poetry workshops on the bus ride down to Mississippi, asking them “to consider the civil rights movement as a bus. If it was a bus, where was it coming from and where was it going? In what condition was it?” Rozga notes that “making that metaphoric leap was hard for them, but they did it.” (You can see what the students experienced and hear some of their poems in a five-minute video made for Arts @ Large by University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee film professor, Portia Cobb. Go to YouTube.com and search Freedom Summer Poetry.)

Milwaukee poet Angie Trudell Vasquez has been on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union in Milwaukee for ten years, and she sees how important the ACLU’s annual Youth Social Justice Forum is for the city’s students. Students gather from all over the city to learn about social activism and how to advocate for change in a wide array of workshops, including Vasquez’s session in which she uses poetry to teach about the past, present, and future in the effort to build confidence and purpose in young people.

Vasquez contrasts our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech with oppressive regimes that torture and murder artists who speak out in protest.

She exposes students to a variety of

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Photo credit: Lisa Vihos

Photo credit: Joe Brusky.

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Above: (l) Overpass Light Brigade and Melanie Ariens at the August 2014 Milwaukee Water Commons “We Are Water” celebration. (r) Author Lisa Vihos at I.D.E.A.S. Academy with the poster made by high school students in Stuart Howland’s graphic design class.

different styles and poets, then encourages the kids to make and share their own poems.

“Through poetry,” she says, “we learn that there is so much more that we have in common even if we have political or ideological differences. I love to hear a young person say, I saw this poet and it changed my life.”

Poetry touches and changes lives, even those lives that are mostly unseen. For the past three years former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Bruce Dethlefsen (2011–2012) has been volunteering to teach poetry in three state correctional institutions in Central Wisconsin (Fox Lake, New Lisbon and Red Granite) with his poet-comrade Bob Hanson, a retired Lutheran minister and Buddhist teacher. They bring writing prompts and an open ear for the inmates to make and share their own poetry, which is always followed by grateful applause.

“What they share is always heart-felt and engaging,” says Dethlefsen, “It’s like [the inmates] have been waiting a long time for someone to care about and listen to what they have to say.”

Poet Freesia McKee, who works with small groups of inmates in work release programs in Milwaukee and Racine can testify to the power of poetry in prisons.

She says that there are “studies that show that creative writing and art projects do decrease recidivism.”

In April 2016, Rozga, Vasquez, and McKee will head to Washington DC with UWM’s Portia Cobb to present at Split This Rock, a biannual poetry festival and conference that highlights the connections between poetry and social 32

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justice. Their panel discussion, “Poetry on the Move: Engaging New Readers and Writers,” will provide strategies for generating and presenting poetry in schools, prisons, and community-based workshops, and identify ways to keep these experiences alive through print, performance, and multimedia.

lines from “High Noon at the Sioux River Poem Farm,” one of Ganson’s many poems that spoke out against the mine: I’m loading my pen with invective again, screaming the truth to power, protecting the hills they want to devour with explosives and vast machines that scour the earth for iron and gold.

It was water that weaponized my poetry.

—Rob Ganson, Washburn Sometimes, poets rally around one very specific issue. For poet Rob Ganson, who lives west of Washburn not far from the shore of Lake Superior, that issue is water. His work as a poet-activist over the past few years has revolved around a collaboration with Mike Wiggins Jr., tribal chairman of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, to fight the development of an iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin.

Proposed by Gogebic Taconite, the mine was to encompass a 22,000-acre strip of the Penokee Hills containing 71 miles of rivers and streams that empty into the Bad River and, eventually, Lake Superior. It would have been the largest open-pit iron ore mine in the world.

During the months when the plan for the mine was being developed, Ganson and poets from across the state wrote and read protest poems at community events and discussions. Ganson says, “It was water that weaponized my poetry. In this movement, we evolve organically. There are no leaders. Everyone just does what he or she is good at.” Here are just a few &

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During Gogebic Taconite’s application phase for the mine, local musicians created songs lamenting the destruction of the land, and a group of Wisconsin artists created their interpretations of the Environmental Impact Statement for the Penokee Hills. Filmmaker Paulette Moore and a group of students from Eastern Mennonite University also created a documentary about the proposed mine called To Wisconsin with Love that incorporates poetry and interviews with area residents (you can find this 44-minute piece on Vimeo.com).

Due in part to the efforts of activists, poets, musicians, and members of the entire community, Gogebic Taconite cancelled their Penokee Hills mine proposal in February of 2015.

“I know our speaking out and reading poems at meetings, vigils, and other gatherings had some bearing,” says Ganson.

“We saw the entire county board go from being in favor of the mine to being against it.”

Ganson feels that activism changed his poetry, infusing it with a purpose. “As often now as I’m writing for the love of the word,” he adds, “I’m writing for the effect my words will have on hearts and minds.”

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Without question, poetry can create change. I, for one, am a living testament to this fact.

—Kwabena Antoine Nixon, Milwaukee Poetry does not change the world all by itself. What a poem can do is incite an internal shift in the heart of just one listener/reader and that one person can go forward into the world to do great things.

“I don’t believe that poetry changes things, it changes people,” says Karl Gartung, co-founder of Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, home to the largest collection of poetry chapbooks in the U.S. “The great value of poetry is that it can open your eyes. If there is no surprise, there is no poem.”

Milwaukee poet Kwabena Antoine Nixon would agree. Nixon grew up on the Westside of Chicago and lost his father to street violence when he was 11 years old. “I was growing up with gangbangers all around, and no one paid too much attention to me. I could have gotten into a whole lot of trouble. Poetry saved my life.” Nixon remembers a particular day in high school when he was turning pages in his book and stumbled upon the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “We Real Cool.”

Nixon knows that in that moment, the poem changed him. It led him to other poets like Langston Hughes, Miguel Pinero, and poets from the Black Arts Movement. Eventually, after he had started to write his own poetry and moved to Milwaukee, Nixon began a

reading series called Poetry Unplugged that provided a forum for many local poets to share their voices and their craft from 2003 to 2014.

Most recently Nixon has been working with activist Muhibb Dyer and others on a campaign called I Will Not Die Young that aims to change the negative statistics associated with growing up black and male in our inner cities. Nixon and Muhibb use spoken word poetry, listening skills, and leadership training to reach out to boys and teach them that there is more to life than the block they live on.

“The future is not with me,” says Nixon.

“It’s with those coming after me.”

Poetry is a spiritual practice.

—Nick Demske, Racine I began this exploration on poetry and change with an observation that poets are lighting the way to change. The Overpass Light Brigade is doing this in a very literal sense. Lane Hall, professor of English at UW–Milwaukee, and colleagues Lisa Moline and Joe Brusky have created an entire movement around the metaphor of “word as light.”

The Overpass Light Brigade began in the winter of 2011 during the recall election for Governor Scott Walker and has since been recreated in fifty chapters all around the U.S. and Europe. The premise—and often the message—is quite simple. Participants stand together in a public space and each hold an illuminated letter to form words and phrases that speak to important issues: Water is Life, Poetic Justice, Unlearn Racism, Be Visible.

“People from all different backgrounds meet, stand next to each other, and become holders of the light,” says Hall. “In so doing, they become aware of the collective nature of the effort. Each letter is separate, and meaning is only made when the letters are held together by cooperating hands. It is performative text.”

This notion of performative text is key to understanding how poetry can change us. Through performance, and the greater context in which the words exist, the text becomes a very sacred kind of a poem: a guide post, a ritual, a spiritual endeavor.

Racine poet Nick Demske talks about poetry as a spiritual endeavor. Demske, another Wisconsin poet who is an organizer for 100TPC, works at the Racine Public Library. He’s the creative force behind the high-energy performance series called Bonk!, now entering its eighth year.

“We need to remind each other that more is possible than what our eyes tell us,” says the indefatigable Demske. “We need to conspire—to breathe together— and, in so doing, inspire.

Of course, I’ve only scratched the surface here. There are many more poets out there, all over Wisconsin, doing important, relevant work. I was not able to include everyone in this piece. By the time these words appear, many more things will have started. More lights will glow, new songs will be sung. The more light we have, the clearer the picture becomes.

We know what we have to do. We have the power to create a better future. We just have to turn on the lights together, one poem at a time. Z

CONNECT: Writing Wisconsin’s Future Join the Wisconsin Academy this winter/spring for a series of talks and articles in Wisconsin People & Ideas that look at the future of our state through the lens of writing. For our Writing Wisconsin’s Future series, we’re talking with poets, fiction writers, scholars, administrators, and journalists whose writing can help us imagine a brighter future for Wisconsin. Here are our upcoming events: • Tuesday, Feb. 23: “Writing Wisconsin’s Climate,” with Sharon Dunwoody @ UW–Madison Biotechnology Center Auditorium • Tuesday, March 22: ”Writing Wisconsin’s Waterways,” with Jerry Apps and Peter Annin @ Madison Museum of Contemporary Art • Tuesday, May 23: ”Writing Wisconsin’s Communities,” hosted by Kimberly Blaeser @ Wisconsin Studio, Overture Center for the Arts Visit wisconsinacademy.org/calendar for a complete list of events in the Writing Wisconsin’s Future series and keep an eye out for articles that look at the future of our state through the lens of writing in the spring issue of the magazine.

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All images copyright Š 2016 by Tom Berenz

@ t h e jam e s wa t r o u s gall e r y

TO M B E R E N Z Workingman

Blue

by Rafa e l F r a n cisco S a l as

I

met Tom Berenz back in 2008 when we were teaching together at Ripon College. Both Wisconsin-based painters with backgrounds in traditional methods, we often met to discuss our views on

painting and art. Since then we have exhibited together and from time to time encounter each other’s work in shows around the state.

Above: Across the Lake (Red House), 2014. 60 by 70 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

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I recently had a conversation with Berenz in anticipation of his upcoming exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery in March of 2016. Reflections on his work and life reveal Berenz to be a Midwestern pragmatist who strives for authenticity in his paintings. His workmanlike approach to his craft reveals a penchant for honesty as he succeeds and struggles in the artistic process.

Art is often seen to connect with—or to be consciously divorced from—an artist’s biography. The contemporary work of Tom Berenz seems to fall somewhere in between.

For two generations, Berenz’s close-knit family owned an auto body shop in the Fox Cities. Encouraged by his parents to pursue an early interest in drawing, Berenz brought his creative sensibility to the nearby University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh where he began studying Art Education.

An internship decorating the interiors of McDonald’s restaurants turned out to be an influential introduction to form and color, contributing to his ability to see painting as a practical pursuit as much as a magical process of inspiration. As his study of art intensified, professors and mentors such as

Li Hu and Jeff Lipschutz instilled in Berenz a desire to take on painting as a rigorous pursuit.

Berenz entered the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison after receiving an MA in painting from Northern Illinois University. Interestingly, he was also accepted into the Masters program at Hunter College in Manhattan, one of the most prestigious art schools in the country. Never bohemian by nature, Berenz felt removed from the lifestyle of this elite art school. A family kid from Fond du Lac with roots deeply bound to Wisconsin soil, he decided to maintain his practice here.

During this time, Berenz began painting events of disaster and calamity, realist depictions taken straight from the AP wire: floods, fires, and homes broken into piles of wreckage. Though not mature works, they began to mark a territory of the psychological in future paintings. Detailed compositions of chaos, his disaster paintings seem to be a reflection of inner thought rather than simple renderings of a dedicated subject.

Berenz also began to move beyond realism into an honest interpretation of his experience. His current paintings, nearly

All photographs by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

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abstract piles of landscape detritus that he calls mounds, resulted from this interpretation. Accumulated masses of self-discovery, these mounds are as much autobiography as reflections on art and contemporary culture. Though often subdued in mood and content, they retain a whimsical love of process and material that is captivating.

In many ways, his mounds move beyond realism, but still retain the world within them. They are jumbled masses of detritus, mashed up heaps of cultural baggage and personal symbols. As with the disaster paintings, we still see lots of bad news: broken and dripping objects hang forlornly in the landscape. But these worlds are also introspective and poetic. A pile of snow thaws into slush, divulging frozen and forgotten objects buried during a bleak winter. An abandoned playground is a mash-up of busted and rusty toys. These are not newsworthy events but rather the landscapes of the mind, an inner state.

They are also expressionistic. Berenz says that in earlier works he found it necessary to work toward realism, that he understood quality in art by how refined and correct he could make his paintings appear to the viewer.

Things have changed.

Berenz is now creating marks that describe mood and atmosphere. Color is used to evoke states of mind. As in a dream, incongruous depictions are forced to interact. Ducks in the sky become digitized versions we would see in a video game. Figures are broken and mix with flaring and saturated daubs that actively dominate the composition. Images collide in a jumble of noise and vision. In my view, these works become more complete as form and content interweave. As the paintings become less realistic, they become more authentic.

Painting is deeply rooted in authenticity. The hand strives to communicate what the mind’s eye sees, what the heart divulges.

It is a strangely accurate barometer of the quality of a painting.

A thoughtful viewer can feel when a painting is inauthentic,

can negotiate a lie in paint as easily as we can identify the dull delivery of a bad actor.

But authenticity shouldn’t be confused with realism. Berenz is working in an ambiguous tradition—not realistic, but not leaving the world behind either. Moments of painterly ambiguity transform into a bicycle, a stuffed toy, garbage. This move between abstraction and the recognizable world creates a tension between the literal and the imagined, between the conscious and dreamed world. This transition—using paint instead of image to describe ideas—forces Berenz’s paintings into new territory.

Dealing with abstraction can be a challenge. Although it has been a Western tradition in art for a hundred years, abstraction often remains mysterious to viewers. Conceived by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky as a universal art form, today abstraction is often considered to be elitist—paintings for painters. When confronted with the possibility that viewers who relate to his realist works may be reticent to accept the new pieces, Berenz says that his current paintings are the only ones he should be making, the ones that speak most directly in his own voice.

In an interview with Fresh Paint Magazine Berenz stakes out his territory: “I explore the in-between space that is neither real nor artifice, still-life nor landscape, natural nor artificial, messy nor clean, flat nor deep, and dynamic nor static.”

His mounds—combining figure, ground, and sky into a mass of emotion—continue to be an area of exploration. Berenz is also expanding his inquiry into autobiography. Childhood visions rise to the surface. A few are quite grim. Berenz mentions a finger being cut off, a near drowning at a vacation lake. Some of these events may be true, others invented. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. They feel like the truth and retain an emotional authenticity if not a factual one. They are memories for a workingman artist to mine and pile up for all to see. Z

CONNECT: Tom Berenz & Shane McAdams Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view March 18–May 8 @ the James Watrous Gallery Tom Berenz (Milwaukee) combines recognizable bits of ordinary life— playground equipment, mittens and hats, ducks and strawberries—with swaths of color and pattern into tight compositions he calls mounds.

Shane McAdams (Fond du Lac) paints familiar, classic landscape scenes— cornfields, wind farms, craggy deserts and mountain lakes—disrupted by jarringly synthetic elements. These side-by-side solo exhibitions are free and open to the public. Join us for an opening reception on Friday, March 18, from 5:30–7:30 pm, with artist talks beginning at 6:30 pm.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more information.

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Top: Tom Berenz, Front Yard Thaw (detail), 2015. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas, 55 in. x 60 in.

Bottom: Shane McAdams, Rorschach Symmetry (detail), 2015. Ballpoint pen, oil, and resin on panel, 48 x 48 in.

@ t h e jam e s wa t r o u s gall e r y

Cake Flight, 2013. 60 by 72 inches. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

Red Flower Ashes, 2014. 55 by 60 inches. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

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Beach Pile, 2014. 60 by 72 inches. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

Mother’s Windmill Garden, 2014. 62 by 68 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

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Winter’s Thaw, 2014. 55 by 60 inches. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

Ghost Rider, 2015. 54 by 58 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

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@ the james watrous gallery

To The West, 2015. 58 by 62 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

Old Playground, 2015. 55 by 60 inches. Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas.

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@ the james watrous gallery

Front Yard Thaw, 2015. 55 by 60 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

Lady Above the Garden, 2015. 52 by 56 inches. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas.

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Snow Plowed, Madison Photo credit: Jason A. Smith

READ WISCONSIN It was late in 2013 and I was scrambing to find an interview piece for the winter issue of the magazine. I had ostensibly called David McGlynn to discuss his award-winning memoir, A Door in the Ocean, when the conversation quickly turned to finding a good balance between work and life.

McGlynn, who teaches at Lawerence University and lives with his family in Appleton, pointed out that finding "balance" is difficult. After all, he said, is writing work or life? Or both?

McGlynn mentioned he had two young boys, and I told him that my wife Liz and I were expecting a daughter in the spring of 2014. The discussion quickly turned to how he finds the time to write. McGlynn recommends getting up very early in the morning, when the house is more or less silent, and putting in at least an hour or so of work before the "chaos" of family life set in.

Now that I have two kids—almost-three-year-old Violet and baby Max—the chaos is constant. So, I've been thinking of getting some professional help with my writing.

It turns out that there are a lot of great writing retreats in

Wisconsin that can help an author focus on completing his or her manuscript while offering literary guidance and advice.

UW–Madison's Department of Continuing Studies offers many classes as well as weekend and longer workshops like Write by the Lake that provide hands-on mini-workshops, critiques, and time to focus on your writing.

Located near Fish Creek, Write On, Door County nutures the work of writers through classes and a writer's residency held in the original chicken coop studio of storied author Norb Blei.

For years Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point has hosted writer's residencies for the winners of statewide writing contests (including our annual fiction and poetry contests).

Also, the newly formed Chippewa Valley Writers Guild is opening Cirenaica, a writer's retreat near Eau Claire, in the hope of "luring" writers there to "find time for their craft."

Of course, there are many more excellent residencies and other opportunities to write. Take the time to find them.

—Jason A. Smith

TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE THIRD PLACE-PRIZEWINNING SHORT STORY FROM OUR 2015 FICTION CONTEST!

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Photo credit: Dwight Sipler/Flickr.com CC by 2.0

Fiction CONTEST WINNER

Wisconsin People & Ideas

2015 Fiction Contest

Stones

By Kathryn Gahl

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was sweating and drooling. It was April. I had almost made it through fifth grade. And now I was leaving the planet. Permanently. Until I heard, “Abigail, honey. Wake up!”

I couldn't.

“You have a fever,” the voice said, panicky. It belonged to Jane, my mother, sliding her hand under me, her only child.

I squiggled. I squirmed. “Leave me alone,” I moaned and meant it. Babies on TV were born kicking and screaming, but when I was born, I surely cried, leave me alone. That’s what Jane and Lester (he’s my father) did, anyway. Monday through Friday, they left me alone. A latchkey kid.

Precious. Rare. Oh, precocious, too—been hearing that one since preschool. Like any of that mattered when Jane found me with my hands limp on a book I was reading about a girl ostracized because she was poor and Polish.

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“Easy now,” Jane said and peeled me off the futon. Just that morning she had certified me sick enough to miss school.

She wanted to come home at lunch but Mr. Glander was donating a Rauschenberg and Jane had to be there. At noon, she called to see how the chicken noodle went down.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“You have a different hunger, honey.”

When she said stuff like that—after reading one more parenting book—I almost thought she cared. But my parents were in their own world. Lester was a Wilson and Wagner accountant, a number cruncher. Jane was a bigwig at &

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the Madison Museum of Art and Foreign Objects. Foreign Objects wasn’t in the title. I made that up. Lester and Jane worked together well. He was total brain, but quiet; I guess you can’t shout at numbers. She was a drama queen, very outgoing, in high spirits and obnoxiously optimistic. I’d never be like Jane. She could convince someone to buy drawings of naked people. If you asked me (no one ever did), that was gross.

But back to that different hunger of mine. When Jane called at noon about the chicken noodle, I felt like a noodle. I didn’t tell her that. She would have raced home, ranting about having to be in two places

at once. She would have fawned over me or maybe she would have called Mrs. Davey three doors down to flop over in fluffy pink slippers and poofy blonde hair with dark roots. So naturally I told Jane, I’m okay, just sleepy.

“Good, good,” she said in her everything-is-wonderful tone. “Take a nap.”

“I don’t want to nap. I want to read my book.” I also wanted to report the words were getting fuzzy on the page, that maybe I needed stronger glasses, but before I could, Jane’s tone shifted.

“Remember then … oh shoot … I’m late for a meeting.” She smacked her lips, which meant she was applying fresh lipstick. “Keep the door locked. Oh, and don’t answer the phone. I’ll be home early. But you call, honey, if you need anything.”

I didn’t bother to say, Roger, Jane, because she had hung up. As for answering the phone and hearing a stranger? It was 1991 and we had caller ID, my parents always guarded and careful.

I poured a glass of apple juice and sat at the dining room table, watching kids who went home for lunch walk past our house.

The day was damp and misty. Daffodils were starting to come up in the front yard.

Grandpa and I loved these days. I called them subdued. (It’s from Latin subducere, to draw from below, in case you want to know.)

Grandpa saw these days differently.

“Mother Earth needs a break from Old Man Sun.” He winked. “And you, Crabby Abby, need a break from those books.”

Just between you and me, I liked it when he called me Crabby Abby. It was not what he said, it was the way he said it. I was thinking about Grandpa when I saw a girl named Taylor skip by. Taylor was a PPRB. Pretty Perfect Rich Bitch. Whenever there was a gathering of three girls, Taylor was the one in charge, bossing the other two, who allowed it. Why? Girls did anything to be popular. The triangle changed, one or two moved in or out, but Taylor ruled.

Right then, I spied her ruling even the sidewalk. I yearned to know how she did it. I wanted to be in Taylor’s crowd, wear laced-up boots with a denim jacket, and watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at her house, instead of alone in my den. Right then, she sensed my wish; she saun-

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{ Book Reviews }

Wisconsin Agriculture: A History

by Jerry Apps Reviewed by Bill Berry 336 pages, $34.95, Wisconsin Historical Society Press The voluminous new history of Wisconsin agriculture by author and historian Jerry Apps is a pleasure to consume, learn from, and enjoy.

Sorry, but this is as close to critical this review is going to get. As many know, Apps is a master storyteller and prolific writer, comfortable in rural fiction and nonfiction realms.

It could be argued he’s the best-ever Wisconsin rural folklorist.

This book, however, is something unlike anything Apps has attempted in his long and fruitful career. A richly-illustrated release from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, Wisconsin Agriculture: A History is a concise and informative chronicle of this place called Wisconsin.

A work of this sort is a challenge for any writer or historian, evidenced by the dearth of agricultural history titles with a Wisconsin slant. Perhaps the telling of the story is so difficult it has dissuaded others from taking a swing. There are a few nuggets, including Robert Gard’s enduring yet ethereal My Land, My Home, My Wisconsin: The Epic Story of the Wisconsin Farm and Farm Family from Settlement Days to the Present (1978) and Joseph Schafer’s comprehensive A History of Wisconsin Agriculture in Wisconsin (1922). But a true history book like this one requires a level and depth of understanding and source materials few possess. A farm-born Wisconsin native, Apps has lived it all along—farmer, educator, storyteller, and author.

Apps follows some of his familiar folksy pathways in the telling of this history, and natural history, of farming in Wisconsin. But he does so in a compelling way that might at once appeal to an array of audiences, from Wisconsin history buffs to agricultural devotees to those with only minor interest in agriculture. Indeed, the book’s strengths are its broad appeal and the way it moves smoothly and efficiently through centuries of developments.

Wisconsin agriculture is varied, from cows and corn and soybeans, to vegetables, fruit, and an array of specialty crops. Yet each is a story in itself.

Wheat dances in the wind in early chapters, cows and corn take their place in others. The immigrants who raise them come in their own waves, bringing their traditions, customs, and beliefs. Machines keep getting better, and so does the cheese. Education drives innovation as agriculture achieves and maintains a huge swath of Wisconsin’s economy, challenged though it always is by nature and economics.

Apps tells the good stories and the tough ones, from cranberry festivals to migrant workers marching for rights. Some may wish for more detail, as in Wisconsin’s ground water challenges, but, given the task at hand, Wisconsin Agriculture doesn’t have time to linger too long on these complicated challenges of the commons.

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read WI tered up our walk and passed through our brick house, her tumbling hair and skinny hips turning into an airplane. She scooped me up and flew the two of us over the rooftops. We saw the mall and the Congregational Church with its white spire and the belt-line highway around Madison. We saw Luke’s backyard with caged-in Dobermans, pacing and whipping saliva strings at the thick wire. We saw Ryan’s mother unload groceries from her Toyota wagon.

Then, my head wobbled as if I had the outside seat on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Taylor gave me a you’re-so-stupid shove. “At least, Taylor,” I pleaded, “invite me to your birthday party. Please, please.”

“Just because you wear aviator glasses?” The trill of her laughter pushed at me. I never got a chance to push back because the next thing I knew, Jane picked at my face as if a lint storm covered me.

Pick, pick, pick. Later, I learned she was peeling strands of hair off my fevered face.

She carried me upstairs to bed. Water ran in the bathroom. She slapped a wet cloth on my forehead. She ran downstairs, back up, and this time plopped an ice pack on my forehead. Then I heard her punch buttons on the hall phone and screech, “Nearly unconscious!”

“Ohh,” I muttered. “Not so loud … ohh, ooh …” My neck pinched. My teeth pounded. Time reversed and I was on the playground with Taylor and Meredith.

I had them under my spell. I told them I thought we could be friends and they started whispering and I said, stop whispering, and they did, and then they said they liked my new powder blue sweater and I thought, should I believe them? By mistake I said, “Should I believe you?”

Then I started to confuse myself and my mind went mumbo-jumbo. I stood on a swing and announced I would stop talking to myself because it showed what a fool I was. Suddenly, Jill buckled my knees from behind and I took a nosedive into the sawdust.

Then, whoosh, I was in the Sisters of Perpetual Guilt Hospital. It was over a hundred degrees. Jane answered some questions (birthdate, address, insurance) before exploding, “Is all this necessary?

She’s dyin’!”

A beefy woman with cigarette breath appeared and lifted my rag doll frame

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathryn Gahl is mad about ballroom dance, the color red, and compassion. Gahl's fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in many journals.

A writer, registered nurse, performance poet, and deep sleeper, Gahl is also a seasoned mother (earned her stripes) and grandmother (the perfect love) who employs home cooking and yoga to achieve high-level wellness.

Gahl has won awards from the Wisconsin Academy for her poems and stories, including the third-place prize in the 2011 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest for her short story "Miles." Her website is kathryngahl.com.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Nickolas Butler: “Stones” is a quirky story with an infectious, youthful voice.

Full of wry observations and a wonderful sense of humor, this story should appeal to readers of all ages.

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unto a stretcher. I puked. “Looks like meningitis,” she said just as I underwent total transformation. My frizzy hair straightened into flowing corn silk.

Birthday girls held helium-filled balloons around me and begged, choose me, choose me. The scene shifted and I morphed into an inchworm, hiding under rose bushes in Ravine Park to watch teenagers smoke and grovel each other while the meningitis germs drilled holes in the scene.

The germs entered my brain too, a maze of distorted thoughts and twisted feelings. It turned out I was in a hallucinatory state—which I had read about—though it’s nothing like what I read. I can’t describe it and this sounds crazy, but I saw love and it is thin as light. Meanwhile, nurses wrapped me in a cooling blanket.

It felt good, to tell you the truth, because I was hotter than melted wax.

I had trouble opening my eyes, too, yet I knew Grandpa was there, holding my hand, talking by touching. I had always been number one to Grandpa and, overnight, I became number one on Lester’s appointment tickler. And Jane? She fussed over me like when she dressed me in crimson velvet for a gallery opening. I was three, staring at stiletto heels and Guess jeans, the wing-tipped men eating Chicken Oscar. Bored, I stuck my finger in the punch bowl and licked it, expecting sweetness, but the punch had a kick. My throat burned. My eyes watered. I wanted out of there, so I said, “What’s the opposite of opening?”

“Not now, lover,” Jane said, rushing to my side.

That was before she changed what she called me. Lester said he was her lover and so Jane called me honey, which in my mind was bee excrement. She never called me Abigail and I wondered why she named me that. Anyway, I knew the opposite of opening so I said, “Closing!”

“Why, yes it is,” Jane said, petting my shoulders.

It was the same nervous pet she gave me in Intensive Care, only there she did not scan the gallery floor, ready with how-do-you-do. This time her eyes darted between the IV needle in my arm and my chest sucking air like a bad swimmer. Her eyeliner welled in bags under her eyes.

I had her full attention and I knew why people got sick.

Well, the devotion from my parents lasted a week. It was replaced by attention from classmates—not during my days in the hospital—but after I returned home.

Taylor brought a roll of freezer-wrap paper. When she unrolled it, I saw it had been signed by 24 fifth-graders at Xavier Academy.

“Miss Williams made everyone sign,” Taylor sneered before Jane came out of the kitchen with bakery sugar cookies and milk. Taylor unloaded my geography and spelling books, plus two sheets of math homework. She put on a nice act for Jane, pretending I was not four-eyes-brace-face, or the last one picked for Keep Away.

“We miss Abigail,” she said. “Especially at recess.” Her hair caught the light and she looked like a model or movie star. I felt sicker.

“She missed you, too,” Jane answered for me, a habit begun in pre-school when we carpooled and she clucked away with other kids while I sat there, amazed she could talk about nothing and make it seem something. Even then I liked numbers because in my mind they did not have personalities or secrets. They were what they were. Human beings, on the other hand, were unpredictable globs of Silly Putty mashed into shapes to trick me.

“The playground’s not the same without Abigail,” Taylor said.

“I bet,” Jane chirped.

As if I would miss a playground where I neither kicked a ball nor caught one. A place where I once fell off the monkey bars, jammed my knee, and told no one.

A place where kids called me Spazzy Abby. I went on the slide only on Saturday morning when Lester was there to spot me. Listen, I was not one of those fat, creamy kids with cookies stashed in their lockers. I didn’t crave Kit Kats or cheesy popcorn. I was just skinny and on the first day of fifth grade when we got our geography books, Josh paged through and promptly called me Ethiopian legs.

I could not help being skinny. I had thin genes and Grandpa said they’re the best because they’re easy to haul around.

But Grandpa wanted me to stop hauling around my pickiness.

It’s not like I picked my pickiness, I told him. It picked me. Grandpa laughed at that. He was old but his laugh wasn’t and he tried to help me with the Taylor

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{ Book Reviews }

The author’s storytelling skills are complemented by the quiet hands of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press editors and designers who composed the pullouts, sidebars, photographs, and graphics that steer the book in the friendliest of ways. The sum of all accomplishes a rare feat for books of history: You can pick up Wisconsin Agriculture, open to almost any page, and be instantly drawn in.

a berserker stuck in traffic: poems

by Erik Richardson Reviewed by Karla Huston 36 pages, $12.95, Pebblebrook Press Last Christmas, my husband gave us an Ancestry.com DNA test. I knew there was a lot of Norwegian in him. Little did I know that I had some of the Norse in my DNA, too. This might explain why I especially enjoyed Erik Richardson’s new collection of poems, a berserker stuck in traffic.

Berserkers were said to be Norse warriors who fought with a trance-like fury, hence the origin of the word berserk. Richardson’s poems are made of a bit gentler stuff, but they manage to sneak up on readers and, like a Valkyrie, whisper in your ear: be wary, be afraid. These berserkers are pop culture, the person in the next cube, the woman in the express line with six-too-many items, or, as the eponymous poem of the collection suggests: […] at a desk, staring at a screen. standing in a long, slow line at the store when a valkyrie whispers in your ear, “you were not born for this.” you remember that your bearskin shirt is stashed in the bottom of your dresser, but the trance is on. […]

These are everyman/woman poems, the howl of the little and small: the teacher, the scientist, the child, the motherless son. An accomplished wordsmith, Richardson crafts poems rife with story, filled with momentum and the music of a good tale. Though he uses little punctuation, Richardson leads readers through his poems using words, pauses of syntax and line. Here’s a sample from “suburbaphobia”: perched on the edge of 92nd street stressed for infecting my neighbors’ yards with wind transmitted diseases—

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Right there in my own house, I felt like hitting someone. I had never felt like that before. Only the rehearsed poise of Jane kept me from sending Taylor to another dimension.

terror. He wanted me to laugh her off, but he didn’t know about all the trouble I endured. Like Eric, the football bruiser who slammed me into the lockers and gave me a black-and-blue elbow; I didn’t tell Jane because somehow it would be my fault. Either she would say I was so dramatic or it would not happen if I were More Positive. I am positive it was Matt who trapped my back foot, tripping me so I lunged forward, face flat on the floor.

After that, I learned to walk with eyes in the back of my head, wondering why kids picked on me.

Once, I told Lester I was henpecked. (If you have studied chicken behavior, you know what I mean.) “I find that hard to believe,” he said. He ran his finger up the side of his nose. “Unless you’re different at school than you are at home.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Then he pasted yellow smiley-faces on the foyer mirror, hoping something subliminal would happen to me. Soon, I filed these situations—they would come to be called bullying—like a column of numbers, unaware of what they would add up to.

Back at the dining room table, Taylor and Jane twittered away like best friends while I counted signatures on the poster, most printed, a few in cursive. They were all there. I looked at Wiley’s name, written left-handed in smeary blue ballpoint. I had a crush on Wiley and he had written, To Amazon, his nickname for me. Did he mean a river or a South American hummingbird? Maybe he meant a girl soldier, or worse, masculine woman.

Amazons cut off their right breast to facilitate the use of the bow and javelin— like Wiley would know that. I was stupid to have a crush on someone like him, a square-faced bratty boy held back in first grade for dyslexia. Miss Williams said he was just lazy. Lazy or not, he was cute.

He wore Michael Jordans and sat on the bench, mostly. But off court, he was popular, dressing in Early Granola, baggy pants hanging off his hips, a Marky Mark slouch. He got some C’s, mostly D’s. He had already found the key to his father’s porn videos. Everyone said he would hold the first beer party for the class, with marijuana for dessert.

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Once, I told Lester I was henpecked. (If you have studied chicken behavior, you know what I mean.) “I find that hard to believe,” he said. He ran his finger up the side of his nose.

“Unless you’re different at school than you are at home.”

Other names marched at me. Ryan, who twisted my fingers until I gave up my math. Jody, who had more gums than teeth but her father was school board president with power over us all. There was Crystal Anne, a new girl I hoped to have a chance with. There was Beth, the only other girl not invited to birthday parties. And Taylor, who had drawn eyes but no mouth in the O of her name. She depicted herself correctly, a girl who last fall promised to include me in her sleepover if I carried her books for a week.

That extended to two weeks, and then three, before I caught on. And now Jane offered one more cookie to the enemy who took it while I wished for more sickness. I wanted the sudden strangeness of fever, when there was nothing to understand or compete for, just eternal soaring and flying.

I stared at the cookie crumbs on the lace tablecloth. Taylor was already at the door. She said, “Well, see you in school.”

“See you,” Jane said, beaming.

I stuck my tongue out at Taylor and braced myself for four more weeks of school before summer vacation, when I &

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would get a break from Taylor and her back-up band of mean girls.

That weekend, Grandpa came for dinner. He brought me a plant—one huge purple flower with stripes on it. “It’s an amaryllis,” he said. “It blooms indoors.

Like you.”

I put the plant on the mantel right next to my favorite photo of Grandpa and his stoneboat. The boat was a thick, flat plank. It was bent where a clunky chain hooked it behind Grandpa’s Ford tractor.

Every spring, he picked stones and put them in the boat. That’s pretty funny, if you think about it—no wonder that boat couldn’t float. In the photo, Grandpa’s arms were tanned and bulky like Hulk Hogan and he grinned ear to ear, like work made him happy while all I could think was, no wonder he took long naps.

I looked at the amaryllis; I looked again at the photo. I thought of him springtoothing the field, then picking up all those stones. Grandpa hobbled over to the bay window and sat on the silk cushion. He asked me to bring him the photo. He squinted. “There weren’t a stone left when we finished.” He sounded melancholic, which is a word for sad that actually sounds sad.

“Do you miss picking those stones, Grandpa?”

“I do and I don’t.”

I wriggled next to him. “Not a stone left when you finished? Not one?”

“You’re smart. You are.” He rubbed his bony knee. “You’re right. The following year, there’d be more stones to pick.”

Because of all the television I watched— Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer had just been arrested, Rodney King’s beating was captured on video, and Unsolved Mysteries intrigued me—I figured there was a dark motive at work. “Did someone unload their stone boat on your field, Grandpa?”

“Nope.”

“Then what?”

“They came out of the earth itself.”

I had studied gravity. I did not think this was possible. Stones were supposed to sink, not swim to the surface. I told Grandpa this. I told him it was worthless, picking stones every spring if they were going to multiply. Grandpa laughed his laugh that rolled up from his belly and burst through his lips. He wasn’t laughing

at me, however. I knew when someone laughed at me. Grandpa wasn’t doing that.

He simply said, “You and your curious side.”

He liked the side of me that questioned everything. But I couldn’t tell him about the things I questioned most, things that were my stones: the parade of mean kids, teachers who ignored the teasing, and his very own daughter, Jane. But mostly I couldn’t tell him about my feelings. They were inside me and it took me a long time to find them. I was pulled to a life of the mind and often I wished for some clue from my body. I dreamed there might be a path between the body and mind that would tell me which feelings to share.

And which ones to keep to myself. Like that thing with Wiley, calling me Amazon because he thought Amazon sounded like Abigail. Did he like me? How would I know?

“Abigail.” Grandpa cleared his throat.

I turned to see him reach in the pocket of his flannel shirt. He pulled out some well-worn red string, tied together at both ends. “How about a little Cat’s Cradle?”

My heart opened as he looped the string around both his hands. Then he put the middle finger of one hand through a loop on the other and pulled. I took my thumb and forefinger and pinched the string, pulling my hands farther and farther apart until the string was taut (that means super tight). Then came the best part. I pointed my fingers down, scooped the string up through the middle, and there it was—Cat’s Cradle, a simple set of swoops and loops for two people.

Besides the Cradle, Grandpa taught me Soldier’s Bed, Diamonds, and Candles.

The loopy red string weaved its way between Grandpa’s fingers and mine, one formation after another. Grandpa was all smiles while I thought of going back to school and facing Taylor and Wiley. I thought, too, of how many spring times it must have taken before Grandpa finally picked that field clean.

I was not going to ask him, however.

I knew it had to do with volcanoes and earthquakes and reversing gravity. Once I figured it out, I could figure out how to make a friend. Maybe I could even find a friend to take a ride on Grandpa’s stoneboat. Z

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{ Book Reviews } incriminating dandelions point back to me even in the dark—I have no clear idea what time the sun died today or will rise again.

Richardson is a skilled storyteller, incorporating mythologies of the Irish, the Norse, and the Greeks. He also manages to weave his tales, using math and science, the voices of Hemingway and Merton, the soft whispers of Heaney, and the mystery of the Bhagavad Gita.

In this collection, Richardson asks big questions—how does a man of heart and principal, a man of spirit, a man of words, live and live well?—yet understands that the answers are tempered by our quotidian existence. In “on the dangers of reading the bhagavad gita during my lunch break at the office,” he asks, what use to us, o computer, are promotions, delights, or life itself?

However, his conclusion, like much of the work in this collection, transcends the moment: when one is free of individuality and his understanding is untainted, even if he quits his job, he does not quit and is not bound.

As such, all is not lost in Richardson’s poems. And he hasn’t gone entirely mad. There is humor amidst the banality, and there are constellations of wondrous light.

In “a berserker stuck in traffic,” the light goes green. the line moves on. your morning meds kick in pulling you down like dwarf-forged chains, the rage that would have once made you holy, battle-favored of the hanged god, fading. pretend: you are just an accountant. poems of the skalds were not true. a sword in the trunk of your car is a really. bad. idea.

Savoring Richardson’s poems in this lovely book is a good idea. A really.

Good. Idea. Z

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Wisconsin poetry

Honorable Mention Poems from our 2015 Poetry Contest

Sand County We trudge through last year’s corn stubble in a wayward, straggling line, drunken with the hour and the cold. It’s April, 4 AM, the air metallic in our noses.

We stoop low, clamber awkwardly into plywood boxes slouching in slush, six strangers crammed together on a rough grainy bench.

We sit in silence, slurping coffee or inhaling its steam, ears straining. There’s a guy who doesn’t get it two blinds over, nattering on in the face of shushing. To block him from my mind, I try to remember poems I memorized in fourth grade, one each week.

The roads in a yellow wood, the fog with cat feet, the wild geese told to go.

But I stop when I get to the one about the prairie. You know, clover and a bee.

And reverie, broken now by a series of eerie, otherworldly humming whoops.

The talker two doors down shuts up and we gingerly open the viewing hatches.

Dawn has crept out across the winter matted grass and one by one the prairie chickens we have come to see venture into the open, each male claiming a little circle of grace to stomp around on, orange air sacks ballooning beneath his chin, a spiky feather crest rearing up behind his head. They dance alone, each angling for the best spot, booming their bizarre, buzzing love call endlessly.

We all wait for the girl who never comes, not this morning at any rate.

A harrier swoops over on silent gray wings, breaks the undulating spell of sound, sends the chickens into the tall grass like scattershot.

We stumble out of our blinds and back across the field to cold cars.

I warm my fingers, numb from gripping binoculars, against the heat vent.

I decide that Emily Dickinson didn’t know dickcissel about the prairie.

How could she, cloistered in a white Amherst saltbox where arching chestnuts and elms framed her world? Here in the sand counties there is no frame, Just a bending ocean of grass under a skim milk sky.

—Jessi Peterson, Eau Claire

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We Were Wrong, But Were Given Five Ruins to Consider for Winter I. It is 76 degrees with no chance of snow for decades.

Some people don’t know what its like to live October through March without blue sky.

So we don’t make ourselves any more of a mess, we talk about about porcelain, bones of men who mine coal. We talk of alleluia, the color of white cotton saturated with mud. Eventually, we sing.

II. Scattered around the Mall of America, our brother. He never wanted to be left alone. He loved that Log Chute ride, the lumberjack and speed of it all, all indoors.

III. Step five: acceptance. We think we understand. Then, we use our words.

IV. Breathe in, please. Is this painful? Deep breaths. This?

Yes. Everything hurts, Doctor. Why else would the heart become a bomb?

V. This season is so much harder than we imagined.

Our niece took all the birds in her pockets, smashed them and made this beautiful dress – see?

If she turned quickly, she became a merry-go-round, no longer rusted. The birds, they flew back up and away, the sky turned white, white from swatches of feathers overlapping mid-motion above the park’s broken glass. In case you were worried that she hurt them, no—you can still hear their chattering on telephone wires, where they pick up and transmit our conversations.

Now you know how the gossip travels in this neighborhood.

—Christine Holm, Oconomowoc

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Let’s Intuit Something Make it specific.

Make it Oregon, Wisconsin. The time doesn’t matter.

And not because of that familiar trope, the middle-American town left outside of time (although this is true), but because you weren’t actually there, have never been, and I am going to place you there.

But since I have the choice, make it August. Make it the elbowed weeds from sidewalk cracks, sun-frayed and squinting through chainlink at the laughs and bearing scurries of the skatepark.

Make it the prairie expanse elementary, as low and sullen as Frank Lloyd Wright’s nailbed as I’ve imagined it, pressed and inked into a fleshy, presumptuous paddle.

And there you are.

This is a week after we decide to play that stranger game in a bar, a week after things get newer and better for a while.

And there are the swings.

You can taste the rust through the pads of your fingers, you can phantom push yourself with a hip-pump, you can listen while I tell you about how, when he was still a teenager, Wright made profit off the ashen slush of Chicago.

He became by placing new things where the old ones had cowered to char, and it’s held that he rarely prepared mock-ups, geometric premonitions. Instead he intuited shapes into buildings, improvised under the flatness of that nailbed.

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We could intuit ourselves, but I won’t make it that.

I’ll make it fire, which again did something for him, destroyed his home in southern Wisconsin as a Caribbean servant stalked the burning halls with an axe. This happened, and I don’t want it to be lessened by your love of The Shining, Jack Nicholson bearing teeth and stubble through a flindered rift.

Don’t intuit that.

Instead, make it this: The late summer sun crests the hills now, fields awash in an orange glow. Sparrows pulse pitch through the dusk and I can tell you’re tired from the way you look at your feet.

And no, fire won’t destroy things for us, but believe me when I tell you this: There was a third fire, a spark in a tangle of electrical line that destroyed the same home, not too far from where we are now.

And he rebuilt it.

Intuit that. I will place you anywhere and build around you.

The kids from the skatepark have sauntered home, the curve and impossible smoothness of the concrete still playing with the vibrations of their movement.

I will place you on a curve, in all your stillness, place myself beside you, and search for the geometry in a country without angles.

—Jess Williard, Madison

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Wiissccoon nssiin n Soo ddoo W S Meem mbbeerrss!! myy M Accaaddeem 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.

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Annual Report 2015

Image credit: Cathy Martin, Country Summer (detail) 2010. Oil on Masonite, 32 x 12 inches.

2015 ANNUAL REPORT Photo credit:Jeff Miller/UW Communications

A Wisconsin where science is central to the health of our people, lands, and waters.

INSPIRING DISCOVERY Through Waterways, an exhibition at our James Watrous Gallery featuring three Wisconsin artists, we explored the confluence between visual art and issues surrounding water quality and quantity. Visitors to Waterways discovered new and creative ways to think about water and its connection to their own lives, and a series of Academy-led events featuring scientists and policy leaders provided participants

Photo credit: Amanda E. Shilling

with new perspectives on the future of our most precious resource.

“Waterways … is the perfect opportunity to showcase the water-related efforts of the recent past, and combine arts, science and letters.”

—James O. Peterson, UW–Madison Emeritus Professor of Water Quality

2015 ANNUAL REPORT Photo credit: Aaron Dysart

A Wisconsin brimming with the arts and a lively creative culture.

Illuminating Creative Work Our magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture—Wisconsin People & Ideas—continues to deliver provocative essays, stories, poetry, and visual art by leading artists, scientists, writers, and innovators from across the state. A trusted resource for people who value an objective perspective on the issues and ideas of today, Wisconsin People & Ideas is a must-read for anyone interested in the

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“It's great to have a magazine like this that shows the spirit of the people of Wisconsin” —Dan Howard, Viroqua-based photographer

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A Wisconsin brought together through civil discussion and exploration of the best ideas of today.

Fostering Civil Dialogue Through our two Initiatives—Climate & Energy and Waters of Wisconsin—the Academy continues to focus on the environmental health and vitality of Wisconsin. In an effort to transcend partisan divides and foster civil dialogue, these programs continue to bring together scientists and scholars with community, nonprofit, and business leaders to listen, learn, and discuss in order to gather the best ideas and

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2015 ANNUAL REPORT

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making A BRIGHTER WISCONSIN The Wisconsin Academy is working to create a brighter Wisconsin through programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. These programs and publications were successful in 2015 thanks to the efforts of engaged citizens who believe that learning, the arts, and civic participation make Wisconsin a brighter place for us all. The Wisconsin Academy staff and

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board of directors thanks you for your support in 2015—and into the future.

“The Wisconsin Academy does an excellent job of sharing knowledge and culture from the academic and research world with the public at large.”

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2015 ANNUAL REPORT

A NOte from the President James Thurber once observed, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.” Having done both, I’m happy to report that the Academy has done neither in 2015. In this past year, the Academy has exceeded even my optimistic expectations.

We have been working hard on several fronts: increasing our capacity to program statewide, building partnerships with like-minded organizations, revitalizing our Board leadership, and developing strategies to expand public understanding of who we are and what we do. The fruits of our 2015 labor include the development of Academy Talks to be held not only in Madison but also in Wausau, Sheboygan, and Weyauwega. As the Academy’s Steenbock Center office becomes older and tighter, we’re exploring other venues to house growing activity. We’re expanding on collaborations with long-time and new partners such as Wisconsin Public Television and the Wisconsin League of Municipalities. And our Board of Directors emerged from the June 2015 retreat in Milwaukee with fascinating new ideas for greater productivity. (This coming June the Board meeting is in Spring Green at Taliesin—imagine what this location will ferment.)

Our stellar programs and publications reflect the energies of a thoughtful staff. In partnership with UW–Madison’s Global Health Institute, the Academy played a statewide (even international) hosting role in the COP21 Paris climate talks, one that highlights our Climate & Energy Initiative. Speaking of partnerships, our work with the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission has brought widening audiences for Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser. Through Waterways and a slate of other compelling exhibitions, the James Watrous Gallery is showcasing the interdisciplinary focus of our mission.

Finally, Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine is covering

events and ideas that make vivid the overlapping nature of different fields.

Clearly our mission—to bring people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on important issues—animates this work. As President, I’ve been grateful to be part of an endeavor that honors civility, knowledge, and imaginative vision. The Academy also allows me to work alongside remarkable staff members as well as the board members of both the Academy and its Foundation. It’s not all parliamentary procedure, long car trips, and boxed lunches, this thing we do. It’s also arguing and laughing and stretching our own capacities—so that Academy members, friends, and program participants can do the same thing all over Wisconsin.

When I began my term as President, I asserted 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.”

I hope this is happening in part because the Wisconsin Academy is not only existing but flourishing.

Linda Ware President, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Professor Emerita, English Department, University of Wisconsin-Marathon County

WISCONSIN ACADEMy STAFF and Board (as of December 31, 2015) We are fortunate to have a talented and dedicated staff and Board working together to further the Wisconsin Academy’s mission to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on important issues.

STAFF Jane Elder executive director Rachel Bruya exhibition coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Zachary Carlson web editor Jody Clowes director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai project coordinator Meredith Keller director, Wisconsin Initiatives Program Elysse Lindell outreach and data coordinator Don Meyer business 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 Linda Ware, Wausau President-Elect Tim Size, Sauk City Immediate-past President Millard Susman, Madison 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 Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, Appleton Foundation President Jack Kussmaul, Woodman

BOARD-AT-LARGE Leslie D. 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

2015 ANNUAL REPORT

WISCONSIN ACADEMY 2014–2015 Year-End Financial Statement Fiscal year 2015 Revenues

Foundation Board

Fiscal year ending June 30, 2015

The Wisconsin 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 – please consider a gift in your estate plans. Please contact Amanda E. Shilling, director of development at 608-263-1692 x16.

Donations 38% Academy Foundation Distributions 35% In-kind Services 4% Grant Revenue 16% Membership Dues 5% Other 2%

Fiscal year 2015 Expenses Fiscal year ending June 30, 2015

Gallery and Arts Programs Magazine & Electronic Comm.

Wisconsin Initiatives Academy Talks & Fellows Program Development Administration Membership & Development Communications

20% 15% 14% 8% 1% 21% 13% 8%

Statement of Activity

Statement of Financial Position

Fiscal year ending June 30, 2015

as of June 30, 2015

Revenue

Assets

Donations........................................................$ 275,827 Academy Foundation Distributions............... 255,976 In-kind Services................................................ 28,488 Grant Revenue................................................. 115,180 Membership Dues........................................... 34,982 Other Revenue................................................. 16,922

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

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

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

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

Founder Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Foundation Officers President: Jack Kussmaul Vice president: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Foundation Directors Jane Elder* Terry Haller Tim Size* Millard Susman* Linda Ware* *Ex officio

119,632 31,994 13,229 84,430 5,089

Total Assets.....................................................$ 254,374 Total Revenue..................................................$ 727,375

Liabilities Expenses Program-related Expenses.............................$ 413,654 Membership & Development......................... 91,514 Administration.................................................. 148,705 Communications.............................................. 56,106

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

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

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

0 5,458 9,764 12,530

Total Liabilities................................................. 27,752 Total Expenses................................................$ 709,979 Total Net Assets............................................... 226,622 Change in net assets......................................$ 17,396 Total Liabilities and Net Assets......................$ 254,374 Net assets – Beginning of year......................$ 209,226 Net assets – End of year.................................$ 226,622

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

Auditors: Wegner CPAs, LLP

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 digital version of our 2014–2015 annual report, visit wisconsinacademy. org/2015report.

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

2015 ANNUAL REPORT

In appreciation of our 2014–2015 DONORS AND SPONSORS The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is pleased to publicly acknowledge those individuals and organizations who gave a cash or in-kind contribution of $100 or more between July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015. Your generosity is an investment in our operations and programs that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.

Thank you for joining us in our efforts to make Wisconsin brighter.

THE MINERVA SOCIETY: Honoring our most generous donors who contribute an annual gift of $10,000+ Anonymous Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region –Renee and Tom Boldt Family Fund The Evjue Foundation Inc., the charitable arm of The Capital Times Sally Mead Hands Foundation Huston Design Joyce Foundation Ruth DeYoung Kohler Madison Community Foundation –Great Performance Fund Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation The Patricia Weisberg Estate Wisconsin Academy Foundation Annual contributions of $5,000 to $9,999 Dane Arts Mary Lynne Donohue & Tim Van Akkeren DoubleTree Hotel Evjue Foundation Great Performance Endowment Fund Walter A. & Dorothy Jones Frautschi Charitable Unitrust Roberta & Dan Gelatt Jack Kussmaul Sheldon & Marianne Lubar Charitable Fund Park Printing Solutions Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

Annual contributions of $2,500 to $4,999 Anonymous W. Jerome Frautschi Charitable Lead Unitrust National Guardian Life Millard & Barbara Susman Stanley A. Temple University Research Parks Thomas Wolfe & Patricia Powers Annual contributions of $1,000 to $2,499 Anonymous John H. Ashley, Jr. Mark J. Bradley Patricia Brady Richard Burgess The Douglas and Sherry Caves Fund Thomas Peneski & Roberta Filicky-Peneski Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin –Murco Foundation Ray & Mary Evert John J. Frautschi Family Foundation, Inc. Greater Milwaukee Foundation –JayKay Foundation Greenfield Public Library Claire & Glen Hackmann Carroll A. Heideman Frances Jones Highsmith Jesse & Nancy Ishikawa Laird Youth Leadership Foundation, Inc. Katharine Lyall Madison Community Foundation –Terry L. Haller Fund Dennis & Gail Maki Jim & Joy Perry Irving & Mildred Shain Tim & Pat Size Gerald D. Viste Dave & Judy Ward

Linda L. Ware Wisconsin Arts Board Wisconsin Historical Foundation, Inc. Annual contributions of $500 to $999 Anonymous Marian & Jack Bolz Greg & MaryAnn Dombrowski Susan M. Earley Charitable Giving Fund William & Lynne Watrous Eich Mary & Jay Gallagher Dudley and Constance Godfrey Foundation, Inc. Bob Goodman & Lauren Randolph Arthur J. Harrington Joseph P. Heim Margaret S. Lewis & Todd A. Berry Tom & Wendy Luljak James T. Lundberg Madison Community Foundation –Ron and Dorothy Daggett Endowment Fund Stephen Morton Bernie L. Patterson Pamela Ploetz & John Henderson Dietram A. Scheufele Barb & Bob Sorensen Tom & Eileen Sutula Marty Wood Annual contributions of $250 to $499 Charles & Mary Anderson Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Inc. Nancy Ciezki & Diane Kostecke Richard & Susan Davidson Larry & Kathy Dickerson

David & Barbara Frank Herbert H. Kohl Charities, Inc. David Lenz Stewart Macaulay National Telemedia Council, Inc. Diane Nienow James R. Peterson Fran & Louis Rall Andrew Richards Roy & Mary Thilly Maxine Triff UW–Sheboygan Annual contributions of $100 to $249 Anonymous (6) Seymour & Shirley Abrahamson Steve Ackerman & Anne Pryor Julius & Hilde Adler Leslie & Vicki Alldritt Carla & Fernando Alvarado Todd L. Ambs Norman & Peggy Anderson Richard & Alice Appen Jerry & Ruth Apps Leigh & Linda Aschbrenner Dr. Alfred Bader Dennis & Naomi Bahcall Tino Balio Robert Beck Brooks Becker Bill Berry Malcolm & Penny Brett Barbara C. Buenger James Cain & Miriam Simmons Jeffrey Calder Elizabeth Campbell Arnold & Donna Chandler Robin Chapman & Will Zarwell R. Alta Charo Sheila Clark Hanrahan Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler

Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin –Mark & Ann Bradley Fund Gregory & Dorothy Conniff Dan & Pat Cornwell Sheila Coyle James & Nancy Dast Donald Davis Laura P. DeGolier Hector F. DeLuca William & Alexandra Dove Patrick & Lloyd Eagan Jane Eisner Herman Felstehausen Don Ferber Jane & Patrick Fitzgibbons Kathy Kelsey Foley & Ernest P. Foley Mary & Jerry Foote DEF & EWF Bernard Friedman Linda Garrity Sharon & Warren Gaskill Jane M. Genzel Michael G. George Janine Geske Martha & Tom Glowacki Joan & George Hall Reed & Ellen Hall James Haney Sue & Steve Hawk Paul & Philia Hayes James V. & Laurie Z. Howard CJ Hribal Allen Jacobson & Lila Daut Molly & Bob Jahn Dr. Norman & Nancy Jensen Thomas S. Jerow Nancy Jesse & Paul Menzel J. & D. Kabot Deborah Kern Laura Kiessling & Ron Raines Mary & Scott Kolar Dr. Kenneth W. Korb Bill Kraus & Toni Sikes

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

2015 ANNUAL REPORT

Sara Krebsbach & Glenn Reinl Roma Lenehan Robert & Dorothy Luening John & Norma Magnuson Howard & Nancy Mead George L.N. Meyer Family Foundation Charles & Carolyn Mowbray John & Kristina Murphy Larry Nesper Robert Newbery & Nancy Sugden Mary Norton Peter Ostlind Edward & Dianne Peters Ursula C. Petersen Thomas & Teresa Pleger Sandra & Christopher Queram Rita & John Race Margaret Rasch & David Stute Karen & John Robison Richard L. & Barbara K. Roe Janet R. Ross Linn Roth Kathleen & Dennis Sampson Mary Woolsey Schlaefer Dean & Carol Schroeder William & Judith Schuele Peter & Carrie Sherrill Amanda E. Shilling Jim & Kathy Shilling Mr. & Mrs. M. G. Singer Joan Skimmons Stephanie M. Smith Harriet Thiele Statz Rayla G. Temin Carol Toussaint Karen Traut Sal A. & Judy L. Troia U.S. Venture/Schmidt Family Foundation, Inc. Stu & Marilyn Urban Peg & Ron Wallace Elwyn & Evelyn B. Weible Frank & Mariana Weinhold Lee Weiss Paul & Coe Williams Helen L. Wineke Alan & Beth Wolf Allen M. Young M. Crawford Young Jennifer & Bill Zorr Dave Zweifel Tribute & Memorial Gifts Randall Berndt Patricia Brady Donna Decker Martha Glowacki Basil Tsotsis

Ira Baldwin

Elizabeth McCoy

Harry Steenbock

Nancy Noeske

The Full Circle Society

Thank you to the forward-thinking individuals who have pledged a legacy gift to the Wisconsin Academy. Through their generous commitment to the programs and publication of the Wisconsin Academy, we will be able to explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture for generations to come.

Ira Baldwin* Constance & Dudley Godfrey* Terry Haller Gunnar & Lorraine Johansen Jack Kussmaul David Lundahl

Elizabeth McCoy* Ron & Dorothy Daggett* Nancy Rae Noeske* Jim and Joy Perry Harry Steenbock* Patricia Weisberg*

A special 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 the Overture Center for the Arts.

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

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

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

2015 ANNUAL REPORT

COMMUNITY PARTNERS, VOLUNTEERS, AND PRESENTERS Thank you to the multitude of individuals and organizations that support the Wisconsin Academy and its programs.

Your invaluable commitment of time, talent, and services makes all the difference.

James Watrous Gallery Exhibiting Artists Randall Berndt Craig Clifford Sarah FitzSimons Thomas Gaudynski Marsha McDonald John Miller Brandon Norsted Tyler Robbins Rafael Francisco Salas Christine Style Paul Vanderbilt Graham Yeager Program Partners, Speakers, & Volunteers Andy Adams Matt Blessing Paul Douglas, Douglas Art & Frame Jack Holzhueter Angela Johnson Lewis Koch Andy Kraushaar Mark Kraushaar Michael Lesy Annette Mahler Meeting of the Minds Martha Moye Katie Mullen Sara Parrell PLATO James Rhem Thor Ringler SPARK! Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Wisconsin Historical Society

Wisconsin People & Ideas Writers & Contributors Sean Avery Jeremy Behreandt Margaret Benbow Luke Benson Kimberly M. Blaeser Brenda Bredahl James Brey Nickolas Butler Kara Candito Robin Chapman Carl Corey Kathleen A. Dale Susanna Daniel Myles Dannhausen

CX Dillhunt Robert Dott Claire Dulgar Ross Feldner JB Patrick Flynn Chuck Ford Kathryn Gahl Louisa Loveridge Gallas Lisa Gaumnitz Martha Glowacki John Gremmer Judith Harway BJ Hollars Jon Horvath Jacqueline Houtman Erika Janik Nancy Jesse Nicole L. Kallio Erica Kanesaka Kalnay Dion Kempthorne Helen Klebesadel Jean Lang James P. Leary John Lehman Marilyn Shapiro Leys Karen Loeb Paul Lukas Heather McCabe Shaun Melarvie Kevin Miyazaki Lorrie Moore Conor Moran John Nelson Megan O’Connell Merri Oxley Franco Pagnucci Jeffery Potter Erik C. Richardson Richard L. Roe Joan Sanstadt Jennifer L. Sauer Jason Splichal Kris Stepenuck William Stobb Jeanie Tomasko Darold Treffert Karl Unnasch Lisa Vihos Judith Waller Linda Ware Dave Willems Zane Williams Elizabeth Wyckoff Program Partners Isthmus Publishing Huston Design

Park Printing Solutions Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts Taliesin Preservation Wisconsin Book Festival Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Wisconsin Public Radio Wisconsin Public Television

Wisconsin Initiatives Speakers Todd Ambs Rich Bishop Stephen Born Chuck Dunning Marian Farrior Robert J. Griffin Moira Harrington Matt Howard John Imes Val Klump Rick Kyte Paul Linzmeyer Thomas Myers Shaili Pfeiffer Keith Reopelle Jeff Rich Dietram Scheufele Kevin Shafer Kirsten Shead Jonah Smith Julie Swanson Roy Thilly Don Wichert Sarah Williams Program Partners & Volunteers Tim Asplund Peter Bakken Jim Baumann Katie Beilfuss Bill Berry Carolyn Betz Oscar Bloch Dennis L. Boyer Joseph Britt Ann Brummitt Elizabeth Cisar Bill Davis Kevin Fermanich Molly Flanagan Ken Genskow Marilyn Goris Madeline Gotkowitz Frank Greb

Bill Hafs Mary Pat Halaska Tracy Hames Brenna Holzhauer Emily Jones Susan Jones Jenny Kehl Peter Kilde Kathy R. Kuntz Kassandra Lang Dick Lathrop Patricia Leavenworth Randy Lehr John J. Magnuson Ezra Meyer Michelle Miller Richard Monette Sierra P. Muñoz Steven Pomplun Rebecca Power Gary Radloff Linda Reid Steve Richter Paul Robbins Jill Sakai Kimberly Santiago Mary Woolsey Schlaefer Denise Schmidt Ron Seely Jenny Seifert Bret Shaw Nikolas Simonson George Stone Mike Strigel Dave Taylor Jim VandenBrook Jake Vander Zanden Kim Walz Kimberlee Wright

Wisconsin Academy Talks & Special Events Speakers Jerry Apps Martha Bergland David Blockstein Monica Butler Stephen Carpenter William Cronon Hector DeLuca Bruce Dethlefsen Ian Duncan David Frank Max Garland Jennifer Uphoff Gray Joel Greenberg Paul G. Hayes

Mrill Ingram Chele Isaac Molly Jahn Anne Kingsbury Jill Krynicki Chris Kucharik Curt Meine David Mrazek Kathryn Smith Marilyn L. Taylor Stanley A. Temple Program Partners Alphagraphics Bricks Theatre Chocolate Shoppe Greenfield Public Library Hubbard Avenue Diner Mead Public Library Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Overture Center for the Arts Cyrena Pondrom Trillium UW Symphony Orchestra UW–Madison Dept. of Forest and Wildlife Ecology UW–Sheboygan Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra Wisconsin Historical Society Press Wisconsin State Herbarium

Volunteers, Interns, & Gallery Attendants Hannah Borgault Augusta Brulla Amanda Dailey Stephanie Dresen Thomas Foellmi Jerry Marra Lorna Miller Joseph Moskwa Jonathan Posthuma Annaleigh Wetzel

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

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

The Burden of Poor Health

Poetry & Pi(e)

Tuesday, March 8, 7–8:00 pm Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, 700 N 12th Street, Wausau

Monday, March 14, 5–6:30 pm Wisconsin Academy Steenbock Offices, 1922 University Avenue, Madison

Dr. Theresa Duello discusses how social and biological causes combine to create health disparities in rural and urban areas of Wisconsin. Free to the public with advance registration, this talk is presented by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters with program support from the Murco Foundation. Additional support provided through our partners: the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, and the Medical College of Wisconsin. Come early for a 6:00 pm reception and meet the presenter.

Join us on Pi Day for a poetry reading featuring current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser. Drawing on literal observation and the power of metaphor, Blaeser crafts poems that dwell deeply on a complex, natural world—which includes the power of human imagination. Coffee and homemade pie will be served in celebration of everyone’s favorite mathematical constant. Tickets to this special event are available for $25 per person for Wisconsin Academy members and $35 per person for the general public.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Gwen Avant & Gregory Klassen Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view May 20–July 3, 2016 Opening reception with gallery talks on Friday, May 20, from 5:30–7:30 pm

Left: Gwen Avant, Untitled (detail), 2015. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Right: Gregory Klassen, Nature Table

Gwen Avant describes her approach to painting as spiritual alchemy. She begins with a gut feeling, transferring her emotions and visceral reactions into color and marks and making visual choices that transmute raw expression into images that communicate acceptance, beauty, and peace. Trained as a painter, Gregory Klassen has become interested in creating environments that reflect his fascination with natural processes.

Most recently he has been exploring other ways of integrating art production with natural forces, working directly with plants, soil, air, and water. This exhibition and related events are free and open to the public.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details