Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2017

Fighting the Formidable Flying Foe Mosquito research in Wisconsin

Fighting the Formidable Flying Foe Mosquito research in Wisconsin

Mayana Chocolate Freedom Riders Grimm & Litherland Mayana Chocolate • Freedom Riders • Grimm & Litherland

The Power of Story A Centennial Celebration with NPR’s Ari Shapiro

Photo Credit: Stephen Voss for NPR

October 14, 2017

Overture Center in Madison Tickets on sale now wpr.org/100

WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Augusta Brulla • Head Gallery Attendant, James Watrous Gallery Chelsea Chandler • Environmental Initiatives Coordinator Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai • Project Coordinator Angela Johnson • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Bethany Jurewicz • Business Operations Manager Matt Rezin • Data & Office Systems Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Communications Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tim Size • President Patricia Brady • President-elect Linda Ware • Immediate-past President Rich Donkle • Treasurer James W. Perry • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Marianne Lubar • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Ashley, Sauk City Kimberly Blaeser, Burlington Malcolm Brett, Oregon Frank D. Byrne, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Kevin Reilly, Verona Nathan Wautier, Madison Marty Wood, Eau Claire OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Andrew Richards • Foundation President Jack Kussmaul • Foundation Vice President Rich Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Vacant • Foundation Secretary

Editor’s Note Let us consider the humble essay.

The word essay seems overly academic, archaic even, invoking in some of us memories of grade-school scribbles about the Oregon Trail or honeybees. But it is a useful way of describing a broad spectrum of the best contemporary writing found in this and many other publications today.

When it comes down to it, an essay is simply an excursion across (and occasionally through) any number of interesting subjects.

Author and essayist Aldous Huxley perhaps best described the form as “a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” But the form need not be limited to nonfiction prose: creative nonfiction, photography, even poetry make for compelling essay experiences.

Huxley also noted that the essay form is known for its relative brevity, which means that an essay needs to get its point across in a fairly short amount of time. Some essays use pointed arguments or grand rhetorical statements to do this, while others deploy raw humor or subtle satire to convey information and persuasion alike (for a fine example of the latter, read Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal”).

Whether comprised of words or pictures, a good essay draws from one of three wells of experience: the personal, the objective, and the universal. A great essay draws from all three. However, this triptych is no easy feat. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, which means “to try” or “to attempt,” indicating the challenge at hand.

But, as readers, we can feel when an essay successfully incorporates all three: the personal element gives us perspective, a lens through which to view the subject at hand; the objective builds reader trust and allows us to be led along the narrative path. And, perhaps most important, readers gain understanding and insight about some facet of the human condition through the universal— and learn something about themselves in the process.

Look for more—and more kinds of—essays in this and future issues of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Happy reading.

TJ Lambert

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Jane Elder Freida Harris Arjun Sanga Tim Size Linda Ware

Wisconsin Academy Steenbock Center Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-263-1692 • wisconsinacademy.org

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Matthew Aliota, assistant scientist in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UW–Madison, is one of many Wisconsin-based researchers developing innovative approaches to fighting mosquito-borne diseases. Photo by Jeff Miller/UW–Madison.

SPRING 2017

1

CONTENTS 10

04 From the Director 05 Letters 06 Happenings Wisconsin Table

10 Sweet Surprise

Shelby Deering

Report

14 Formidable Flying Foe

Silke Schmidt

Read Wisconsin

20 To the Quarry, Together

C. Kubasta

Essay

28 Bus Ride

B.J. Hollars

@ the Watrous Gallery

34 The Fairytales of Grimm & Litherland

Diane M. Bacha

34 Gerit Grimm, Flower Girl Tondi, 2015.

Stoneware, 24 x 24 x 6 inches.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

James Gathany/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

14

Fiction

44 The Remedy of Fortune

I.S. Kallick

Book Reviews

50 The Hearts of Men, by Nickolas Butler

Jason A. Smith

51 The Transit of Venus, by Susan Firer

Lisa Vihos

52 The Biology of Consciousness, by Thomas J. Erickson

Ronnie Hess

Poetry

53 Poetry

Todd Temkin, Andrea Potos, Antler, and Sunmi Famule

VOLUME 63 · NUMBER 2 SPRING 2017

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 15589633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

Since 1954, Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from our visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters.

Copyright © 2017 by the Wisconsin Ac a d e my of S c i e n c e s , A r t s a n d Letters. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid at Madison, Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor JEAN LANG copy editor JODY CLOWES arts editor NIVEDITA SHARMA editorial assistant CX DILLHUNT cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

A magazine by and for Wisconsin.

Subscribe today and get the best of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture delivered to your door four times a year.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/subscribe

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Amanda E. Schilling

From the Director

Early in my career my work involved frequent trips to Washington DC. Occasionally, my colleagues and I would carve out time to catch a play or concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Perched on the banks of the Potomac River and home to the National Symphony Orchestra, it is, in many ways, America’s performing arts center. On a pleasant evening one can stroll along the river walk and read the quotes from President Kennedy chiseled into the Carrara marble wall. One panel reads: I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.

I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.

Seeing these words, on a night when I had the rare privilege of immersing myself in a play or concert in that splendid setting, lifted my heart and made me proud to be an American—and grateful for Kennedy’s vision for our nation.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

And yet, the Trump Administration has recommended the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. While history has shown that there is strong support for the arts and humanities on both sides of the aisle, proposals like this stir up a lot of attention and anxiety.

The NEA and NEH support both rural and urban communities across America through grants and programs that cultivate creativity as well as jobs, and they generate artistic and cultural experiences that enrich lives and local economies. When you consider that the NEA and NEH work their magic with only $148 million dollars apiece annually, about .003% of the entire federal budget, it is simply amazing that they can offer such a solid return on a rather modest investment.

Beyond the sound economic logic of investing in the arts and humanities are the beauty, hope, and meaning that they bring to so many lives. Whether music and dance, painting and sculpture, film and theater, or history and poetry, the arts and humanities speak to our desire for excellence, and our need for pathos and joy. This is the stuff that makes us ponder, laugh, and cry, the fabric that ties us together as thinking, feeling human beings. If indeed the arts and humanities are a kind of magic, then the magicians are us.

Further along the wall at the Kennedy Center is another quote, taken from a speech Kennedy gave at Amherst College in 1963: I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

More than half a century later, America needs to keep working to realize this vision.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

NEWS for MEMBERS ANNUAL SPRING FUND DRIVE Our annual spring fund drive is in full swing.

Each dollar raised provides the essential funds and resources the Academy needs to support important programs and publications that foster civil dialogue as well as critical thinking, discovery, and inspiration throughout Wisconsin. Please consider a tax-deductible gift beyond your annual member dues to help us reach our $35,000 goal before June 30, 2017. Give online today at wisconsinacademy.org/donate.

FELLOWS NOMINATIONS Nominations are open until September 30, 2017. We need your help to identify the candidates for our 2018 class of Wisconsin Academy Fellows. Fellows are remarkable people from communities throughout Wisconsin that have made significant contributions to the cultural life and welfare of our state and beyond. You can nominate someone yourself, or share this information with others. For more information, visit wisconsinacademy.org/nominate.

CREATIVITY SERIES Over the last year, Growing Our Creative Power, our public Academy Talks series explored how specific investments in the knowledge economy and our creative sectors can make a brighter future for Wisconsin. Watch and share videos of our insightful Growing Our Creative Power series conversations on our website at wisconsinacademy.org/creativeWI. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Don’t forget: We want to hear from you.

Please send feedback and comments about Academy programs and publications to editor@wisconsinacademy.org.

Letters I was excited to read about Wisconsin’s new Poet Laureate, Karla Huston, in the last issue (Winter 2017). But I was disappointed, however, to see that only one of her poems was included. (I see that more are included on your website, but do not discount the paper audience.) A “taster” of at least three poems would have better given readers an idea of the poet representing our state. From what little I did read, I liked. Good luck on your new position, Karla!

Sarah Kyrie, Argyle Exhibiting Daughter Cells at the James Watrous Gallery this past winter was truly one of my most memorable and valuable experiences as a Wisconsin artist. The professionalism and dedication of gallery director Jody Clowes and staff were exceptional. The Wisconsin Academy provided such an enriching time for me as an artist by believing in the concept of my work and putting their energy behind it in so many ways, including the article by Lynne Harper in Wisconsin People & Ideas (Fall 2016) that explored my and Dr. Mark Burkard’s collaboration. The whole experience encouraged me to keep creating, and helped to open doors for future collaborations and connections.

Leslie Iwai, Middleton

I am both humbled by and proud of the programming accomplishments of the Wisconsin Academy: humbled because of the modest status of Academy activities during my own time as executive director (1971–80), but proud to have ever been a part of what I now see as having been its adolescent years, ones that sought a measure of stability even as it worked to adapt to new and changing times.

Congratulations to you all, to the Academy board, and to contributors of all kinds and ways.

James Batt, Madison

Errata In Myles Dannhausen Jr’s “How to Spot a Cow” (Winter 2017), a typographical omission reduced the eighty New Glarus Brewing Company employees to only eight. Also, contrary to what was published, New Belgium Brewery was not purchased by an international conglomerate, and they are instead independent and entirely employee-owned.

In our Winter 2017 Poetry section, Janet Leahy’s poem “Breakfast with Poets” was mistakenly attributed to Jeri McCormick, while McCormick’s “The Sighting” was mistakenly attributed to Leahy.

SPRING 2017

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Happenings

LANDMARK

America’s most-famous cross-country ski race now has its own museum. Located in Hayward, the Tony Wise Museum of the American Birkebeiner transports visitors back to the origins of the American Birkebeiner through state-of-the-art exhibits, hands-on activities, a three-dimensional trail model, and numerous race artifacts, including historic race films and photographs as well as oral histories of skiers, staff, and volunteers.

Founded in 1973 by Hayward native and museum namesake Tony Wise, the American Birkebeiner (or, Birkie) is patterned after the annual Birkebeiner Rennet ski race held in Norway. Birkebeiners were 13th century skiers, celebrated for escorting prince and heir to the Norwegian throne, Haakon Haakonsson, safely from Østerdalen to Trondheim.

Wise discovered skiing when he served in Germany during World War II, and, upon return in 1947, established Telemark Resort in Cable. His vision for a cross-country ski race running from Cable to Hayward went on to be formative for both his community and the sport. Today over 13,000 skiers of all ages and abilities and 20,000 spectators from around the world gather every February for this legendary race.

The Tony Wise Museum, which opened its doors in August of 2016, features many unique items in its permanent collection, including the St. Olav Medal presented to Tony Wise by King Olav of Norway in 1975 for his spreading of Norwegian culture and tradition. Much of the memorabilia in the collection—from one of U.S. Olympic medal winner Bill Koch’s steel-tipped skis to a 1988 congratulatory message to Birkie organizers from President Ronald Reagan—was donated by Birkie skiers and supporters.

“The American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation is always seeking to further its mission and inspire generations of skiers,” says its executive director and longtime Birkie supporter Ben Popp. “Without Tony Wise’s vision, the Birkie wouldn’t be what it is today.”

Jason A. Smith 6

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

On March 22, 2017, the Washington DC-based National Trust for Historical Preservation granted “National Treasure” status to an iconic Milwaukee landmark: The Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory.

While the National Treasure designation doesn’t provide funds or protections, it does signal a commitment from the National Trust to work with local and national partners to develop preservation solutions. “We’re shining a spotlight on the properties,” says Jennifer Sandy, the project manager for the National Trust assigned to what Milwaukee locals call “the Domes.”

Constructed in Mitchell Park between 1959 and 1967, the Domes consists of three beehive-shaped glass structures, each 140 feet in diameter at the base and 85 feet high, connected to a central lobby area. Developed by Milwaukee architect Donald L. Greib, the unique design permits over 85% of available light to be transmitted to the plants through quarter-inch thick, wire-reinforced glass.

Each dome provides a unique horticultural experience: the Desert Dome features unique plant species adapted to survive extreme temperatures and droughts; the Tropical Dome displays over 1,200 species of rainforest plants as well as a few exotic birds; and the Floral Show Dome houses cultural-, historical-, and artistic-themed plant exhibits.

The Domes have been a center of community life in Milwaukee for generations, hosting weddings, concerts, educational programs, and tours for nearly 250,000 annual visitors.

However, in recent years the Domes have fallen into disrepair. In January of 2016 they were temporarily closed to ensure the safety of employees and visitors. Even though they opened later in the year, it became clear to Milwaukee County officials who own and operate the Domes that a plan was needed for their long-term preservation.

To address this, the National Trust, along with the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, are launching a public campaign to support a preservation solution for the Domes and issuing a report (along with engineering firm Wiss Janney Elstner Associates) that puts a $18.6 million price tag on a comprehensive rehabilitation.

It’s a price worth paying to preserve this “stunning and absolutely one-of-a-kind place,” says Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Meeks says that creative modern architecture often demands equally creative approaches when it comes to restoration. “Rather than risk losing this iconic piece of Milwaukee’s heritage, we need a thoughtful, long-term preservation solution for the challenges facing the Domes,” says Meeks.

Nivedita Sharma

The Park People of Milwaukee County

Tony Wise Museum/ASBF

MUSEUM

Happenings

BOOK

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

Historian John Gurda will receive the Council for Wisconsin Writers Major Achievement Award for literary merit during the organization’s annual awards celebration in May. Gurda, who was named an Academy Fellow in 2009, has published some of the definitive books on the city of Milwaukee, including Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods (2015), which explores how immigration and global and local economies have shaped Milwaukee communities, and The Making of Milwaukee (1999), a comprehensive history of the city.

Award-winning journalist and member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Patty Loew is now working with the UW–Madison School of Human Ecology to lead the UW–Native Nations Initiative. The new partnership between UW– Madison, UW–Extension, and UW Colleges is working to improve the relations between the University of Wisconsin and the twelve Indian nations located in the state. Loew, who became an Academy Fellow in 2016, says that, “Native communities have a rich understanding, not only of science, but also Traditional Ecological Knowledge. They are first to notice changes in their natural landscapes. Our UW scientists and science communicators can benefit from this knowledge and contribute their own scholarship to promote greater understanding about the challenges that face us all.”

Though I was raised in landscapes where mountains—or at least hills—served as the primary physical and emotional frames of reference, I can see how living beside a river such as this would imprint one with both stillness and fluidity, the ability to be in motion and to be both calm and aware of being in motion at the same time. Although the Wisconsin is different—and bigger than— rivers I have known well, watching it takes me back to my own origins in water. I think of rivers that began me, like the Perkiomen in eastern Pennsylvania, rivers that raised me and helped me endure, like the Titicus in rural New York State, rivers that healed me, giving me back to myself, like the Marys River in western Oregon, and finally, rivers that have taught me something I didn’t know about myself, such as the Yahara in Wisconsin.

The book is peppered with quotes from writers and poets— Rachel Carson, Wallace Stegner, Henry David Thoreau—who inspire Townsend, but her deeper influences are the rivers of her youth: the Perkiomen in Pennsylvania, the Titicus in New York, Marys River in Oregon. For Townsend, the Wisconsin River seems to lead to all other rivers, now and in the past. This ur-river provides a way for her—and perhaps for readers of her book—to navigate a turgid and tumultuous life, as well as a constant reminder that nature can inculcate in us all (in the words of Carson) a sense of wonder.

NCIL

John Gurda

In a remote cabin near Mazomanie, Alison Townsend began her quest to know the Wisconsin River—and herself. “I studied the river,” Townsend says, “pondered and interacted with it every day, and one memory led to another.”

For Townsend, Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, rivers are the perfect vehicle for exploring place and memory. Her new book, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, examines the ways in which nature informs ideas of home through lyrical prose that connects memories of her past to reflections on water.

Townsend’s first chapter, “The Wisconsin River, Mazomanie, Wisconsin,” sets the contemplative tone for this slim volume, recently released by the Florida-based Burrow Press:

Jason A. Smith

The world-renown Chazen Museum of Art will be losing one of its most important pieces this summer with the retirement of long-time director Russell Panczenko. Named an Academy Fellow in 2016, Panczenko recently announced that he will retire on June 30, 2017, thus bringing to a close his over 33 years of leadership at what has become the second largest collection of art in Wisconsin.

Jason A. Smith

SPRING 2017

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Happenings

I N N O V AT I O N

MAGAZINE

Andrea Paulseth/Volume One

Rebecca Nelson

Taking its name from a storied intersection in downtown Eau Claire, a new literary magazine called Barstow & Grand promises to be the perfect complement to the city’s burgeoning arts and culture scene.

Even though Eau Claire has “very blue-collar roots,” it still supports a lot of writing groups of all stripes, says Barstow & Grand founder and editor Eric Rasmussen. “Now, [with this magazine] we’re building towards something grand and artistic,” he says. “We can provide that experience for local writers, be supportive of the people around here who maybe have dreams of something bigger.”

Rasmussen’s goal for the magazine reflects the philosophy that drives its parent organization, the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild (CVWG), which works to support regional writers through craft talks, writing residencies, readings, and other community initiatives.

While writers don’t have to live in the valley to submit their materials to the new magazine, submitters are asked to prepare a brief (less than one hundred words) “Chippewa Valley Connection” statement to accompany their work. Because the magazine was founded “over beers on the porch,” Rasmussen chuckles when he notes that more than a handful of submissions thus far “connect to the region through Leinenkugels.”

Barstow & Grand accepts fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid text submissions of up to 4,000 words from March 1 to April 30 each year, and will publish their annual edition in the fall of that same year. Look for the inaugural issue of the magazine to arrive in time for the October 26, 2017, release party at Volume One headquarters at 205 North Dewey Street, Eau Claire.

The Barstow & Grand crew: (left to right) poetry editor Kate Hinnant, consulting editor B.J. Hollars, editor Eric Rasmussen, and prose editor Charlotte Kupsh.

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Rebecca Nelson always had a passion for raising fish; by the time she was ten, her family’s home was filled with aquariums. Her partner, John Pade, grew up on a dairy farm, learning a lot about livestock and agriculture. The two combined their skills and interests in 1984 when they founded an aquaponics company called Nelson & Pade Inc. Located in Montello, the company today creates new aquaponics technologies and systems while generating sustainably raised food for the Central Sands Region. It also provides training and support for aquaponics growers worldwide.

Aquaponics combines aquaculture (fish farming) with hydroponics (soil-less plant growing) through an integrated system. Large tanks hold fish that are fed pellets or other protein-rich food. As their water is refreshed, the old water passes through a biological filter and on to trays of growing media (usually a fine gravel) for plants. In the trays, nitrifying bacteria convert the waste ammonia from the fish into the nitrates vital for plant growth. The growing plants remove more and more of the nutrients, filtering the water until it is clean enough to return to the fish tanks.

In their 14,000-square-foot commercial greenhouse, Nelson & Pade Inc. utilizes cutting-edge technologies to grow tilapia, lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, kohlrabi, radishes, and other vegetables. The fresh fish and vegetables are made available at local farmers’ markets and sold to restaurants, retail stores, and schools in Montello and throughout Central Wisconsin.

“These systems allow us to produce food all year long while using less water, and no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. With little environmental impact, we can provide food in our communities and support local businesses,” explains Nelson.

The commercial greenhouse also houses the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point Aquaponics Innovation Center (AIC) and classroom. Since December 2014, AIC has been working with Nelson & Pade Inc. to further aquaponics research and technological development in areas such as optimizing walleye growth, investigating effects of certain pharmaceuticals on aquaponics systems, and tracking aquaculture farming in Wisconsin.

In conjunction with AIC, Nelson & Pade Inc. offers a popular, three-day Aquaponics Master Class with hands-on sessions that focus not only on aquaponic methods, but also on economic and business considerations. Over the past twenty years, the team has taught aquaponics to thousands of people from over a hundred countries.

As the industry continues to grow, Rebecca Nelson foresees a promising future where “aquaponics has the potential to change the face of agriculture [by] increasing the availability of fresh, nutritious food for people around the world.”

Nivedita Sharma

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SPRING 2017

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Wisconsin Table

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Kara Vincent Art

Wisconsin Table

SWEET SURPRISE

BY SHELBY DEERING

M

uch like its award-winning confections, Mayana Chocolate in Spooner is full of surprises.

Run by husband-and-wife owners Daniel and

Tamara Herskovic, Mayana Chocolates produces an array of handmade treats, including six signature chocolate bars that incorporate gourmet ingredients like vanilla bean shortbread, crispy coconut cookies, and bacon-almond praline.

SPRING 2017

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Wisconsin Table

“When we were in Chicago, we only thought of doing business in Chicago. When we moved to small-town Wisconsin, the whole world opened up.”

Daniel Herskovic “We make all of the ingredients that go into our bars,” says Daniel.

“We slow-cook our caramel. We grind our own praline paste. We make our own shortbread. And we purchase high-quality chocolate from fair trade producers in Ecuador or West Africa.”

The pair describe their chocolates as “elegant and innovative.”

When it comes to flavor ideas, they ask, “What do people truly want to eat when it comes to chocolate? and then present it in a fun and unexpected way,” complete with beautifully-designed packaging created by Tamara. Both Daniel and Tamara agree that “what is inside is very important, and the impression it makes on the outside is equally important.”

Their Space Bar features vanilla bean nougat, toasted almonds, and fleur de sel caramel wrapped in a blend of dark chocolate. The Mayan Spice bar which, according to Daniel, should be enjoyed with a glass of bold red wine, is a combination of dark chocolate ganache, sea salt caramel, and toasted corn tortilla.

While Tamara loves the chewy Coconut Dream Bar, Daniel prefers the Heavens to Bacon Bar, which (of course) contains bacon-praline, potato chips, and smoked sea salt caramel. He says that while the Kitchen Sink Bar is a favorite among customers, critics just can’t get enough of the Space Bar. The demand for Daniel and Tamara’s chocolate really took off in 2014, when Food & Wine editors named the Kitchen Sink Bar, which includes peanut butter, pretzel pieces, crisp rice, and fleur de sel caramel, a Top 10 Pick. Since then Mayana Chocolate has received a number of accolades, including being named a 2016 Top 10 Chocolatier of North America by Dessert Professional magazine,

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

a widely-respected trade publication, and a 2017 Good Food Awards winner for their Space Bar. The two have enjoyed working together since they met a decade ago in Chicago, where Daniel was a professional chef and Tamara was an event planner. The duo pooled their skills and resources to create a private catering business and was looking for a way to set themselves apart when Daniel came up with the perfect take-home gift for clients: gourmet chocolates.

“I became fascinated with chocolate [but] I realized I needed some help. So, I sought out … some of the best chocolatiers in the United States and France. They showed me the techniques, and, ever since, chocolate has become an obsession.”

Studying with some of the most respected names in the chocolate world, including Manhattan pastry chef Andrew Shotts and renowned French chocolatier Lionel Clement, Daniel perfected his technique. “For [chocolate] to work properly, one needs a temperature-controlled room and a respect for time. It simply can’t be rushed,” says Daniel.

Relocating to Spooner in 2013 changed the couple’s business focus from the “Chicago scene” to a more community-based approach. Even though they had been there many times (Tamara’s parents live in Spooner), the couple was surprised to find how much the town rallied around their new business. “In a big city, businesses fail every day without anyone noticing. But if we run into trouble, we have the support of the community to find a solution,” says Daniel, noting how much support they also received from the Northwest Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

cislander

Wisconsin Table

Their modest production facility is now located on a quiet residential street, and their chocolates can be found in retail locations across Wisconsin and 25 other states. Daniel and Tamara hope to expand to all fifty states in 2017 and develop stronger connections with retail customers in Japan, Canada, and other countries that are beginning to carry their chocolates.

Even though Mayana Chocolate is now a national brand, the company stays true to its Wisconsin roots by incorporating local ingredients whenever possible. They use local dairy and honey when it’s available, purchasing from producers like Crystal Ball Farms Organic Dairy and Milk N Honey Acres. Mayana Chocolate has also featured the work of local artist Bob Macone, who built the wooden display racks for Mayana’s local retail outlet.

Although Daniel and Tamara could have lived out their dream most anywhere, the two are happy to live and make their chocolate in Spooner. They call the Mayana Chocolate team their “family,” and they say that Spooner is “the best place to manufacture our chocolate and grow our business.”

“Wisconsin is a great place to make a food product. I think when many people hear of Wisconsin, they associate it with natural and pastoral surroundings. The people who help us build our business are wonderful,” says Daniel, adding, “When we were in Chicago, we only thought of doing business in Chicago. When we moved to small-town Wisconsin, the whole world opened up.”

DANIEL HERSKOVIC’S TOFFEE RECIPE INGREDIENTS 1 pound roasted almonds (chopped fine) 1 pound butter 1 pound sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 pound 38% Guittard Milk Chocolate

Couverture, melted

Shelby Deering is a Madison-based lifestyle writer and business owner, contributing travel articles, home tours, and profiles to national and regional publications such as Midwest Living and BRAVA. She firmly believes that chocolate should be its own food group.

INSTRUCTIONS In a large saucepan, melt the butter. Once melted, add the sugar and salt. Stir constantly until the mixture registers 300 degrees on a candy thermometer. Immediately stir in half of the chopped roasted almonds.

Pour the still-warm mixture on a silicone-baking mat or parchment paper-lined baking tray. Allow to cool for one hour. Then spread with melted milk chocolate (you can use dark if you prefer).

Sprinkle chopped almonds on top. Flip the slab of toffee and repeat on the other side.

Allow to cool completely before packaging or eating.

SPRING 2017

13

Report

FORMIDABLE FLYING FOE

BY SILKE SCHMIDT

B

uzz. Ouch. Slap. One down, one hundred quadrillion to go.

While there are 3,500 mosquito species found worldwide, we only have to contend with 56 of them here in Wisconsin. This is cold comfort, though, when confronted by a swarm on a family hike or picnic. These small insects are mainly a nuisance for us in the summer months. But, for many people across the globe—especially those living in tropical climates—they are a constant threat, bringing disease and death to humans and animals alike.

A female Aedes aegypti mosquito in the process of acquiring a blood meal from a human host.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Report

James Gathany/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

SPRING 2017

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UW

SP

Com

munications

Report

Jeff Miller/UW–Madison

April showers bring May mosquitoes, according to Jamee Hubbard. Hubbard is an expert in the life history, ecology, and pest importance of a variety of organisms.

An expert on mosquito-borne pathogens such as the Zika virus, Matthew Aliota works with a strain of Aedes aegypti mosquito.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

According to Jamee Hubbard, an associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, even though these tiny insects sometimes carry harmful parasites, they play an important role in healthy ecosystems. Many fish feed on mosquito larvae, which are aquatic, and plenty of birds and spiders and other insects such as dragonflies and damselflies feed on the adults.

Hubbard says we have so many—and so many kinds—of mosquitoes because they thrive wherever there is fresh or brackish water, and because they have evolved in many different ecosystems over millions of years. Mosquitoes appear in fossil records from at least 90 to 100 million years ago, and some evidence suggests an origin more than twice as old.

These are tough little bugs. While adult males typically die as the weather cools, the females of some species produce a kind of antifreeze called glycerol that prevents tissue damage and can help them survive below-freezing temperatures, especially if they overwinter in an insulated hiding place.

Other mosquito species survive the winter as eggs, larvae, or pupae in a state of arrested development known as diapause until longer days and warmer temperatures kick the wheel of life back into gear. The newly emerged mosquitoes start out feeding on plant nectar, using a pointy straw-like mouthpiece called a proboscis.

Soon enough, they begin to look for a mate.

Once fertilized, a female mosquito needs to find a human or other (preferably warm-blooded) animal from which to extract a meal of blood. Blood provides an essential protein for nourishing her eggs, which she will deposit in water. After landing on a host animal, she uses her six needle-like mouthparts to probe the skin for a blood vessel and inject a numbing agent and blood thinner.

Taking between one and five minutes to finish her meal, the female mosquito leaves behind the bumpy pocket of histamine and swollen blood vessels we know all too well as an itchy mosquito bite.

But in some cases the story doesn’t end there. When a female fertilized mosquito quenches her thirst for blood on a host infected with a parasite (often a virus), it can survive and multiply inside her. Subsequent bites by an infected female mosquito can in turn transfer the parasite to new hosts, and, with sufficient repetitions of the cycle, an epidemic may begin in a human or animal population.

Whether it was the first recorded malaria symptoms thousands of years ago in China or the Zika epidemic unfolding across the Americas today, the basic transmission mechanism behind these diseases has remained the same. And although Wisconsin’s winters are inhospitable to the species of mosquitoes known to transmit deadly viruses, scientists from across the state are leading the fight against mosquito-borne disease around the world.

MOSQUITOES AND DISEASE We often think of major wars as taking the greatest toll on human life. But Daphne Pham, a professor of biological sciences at UW– Parkside, points out that the sum of all war casualties in history pales in comparison to human deaths attributed to mosquitoes.

Fortunately for us, Wisconsin’s mosquitoes don’t carry any deadly diseases. Infection with West Nile virus, the most common mosquito -borne disease in our state can be hard to diagnose. While 80% of infected people don’t experience signs of disease, the remaining

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20% have mild symptoms such as fever, headache, muscle pains, a skin rash, swollen lymph nodes, and increased sensitivity to light (a very small percentage exhibit severe symptoms).

Contrast this with the malaria parasite, a protozoan of the Plasmodium genus, which is the world’s number one mosquito-borne killer. Transmitted by about two-dozen mosquito species in the Anopheles genus, malaria strikes half a billion people every year and kills about two million, half of them children in sub-Saharan Africa.

The dengue virus, the world’s second-worst killer, was identified in 1779. Today about 2.5 billion people (30% of the world’s population) live in areas at risk of dengue transmission, and the disease causes about 25,000 deaths per year. Even though yellow fever is much better controlled—its last outbreak in the U.S. occurred in 1905—there are still hundreds of reported cases in South America and Africa every year.

While chikungunya virus can cause fever and joint pain, death from the disease is rare. First detected in 1952 in East Africa, this virus is thought to have reached its peak in 2015 with 700,000 suspected and more than 37,000 confirmed cases in the Americas.

Because the symptoms of mosquito-borne diseases overlap, it can be very difficult to diagnose them. It is also a challenge to track how diseases move in human populations because the mosquitoes that acquire viruses from infected hosts don’t always transmit them.

It turns out that the virus itself has to overcome a few significant hurdles in order to be passed along.

First, the virus has to travel through the mosquito’s proboscis to its midgut and survive an attack by the mosquito’s own immune system. Next, the virus has to use the mosquito’s cellular resources to make many copies of itself; inefficient replication results in copy numbers that are too low for transmission. Last, the viral progeny have to travel from the midgut back to the salivary glands to be passed on to the mosquito’s next victim.

The ability of some viruses to overcome all of these obstacles is an example of co-evolution, says Jamee Hubbard: The parasite’s genes change in response to genetic modifications in the mosquito, resulting in better mutual adaptation over long periods of time.

Since these coordinated genetic changes are rare events, the number of mosquito species that are effective vectors for diseasecausing viruses is a small portion of the 3,500 that exist worldwide.

Hubbard points out that, for instance, “the parasite that causes malaria can enter multiple different species of Anopheles mosquitoes, some of which we have in the United States. But we don’t have the species that can effectively transmit it.”

Matthew Aliota, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, works to better understand how mosquitoes transmit disease to humans.

Aliota tested whether Culex pipiens, a Wisconsin mosquito that is capable of transmitting West Nile virus, could also transmit the Zika virus. “The mosquito cell has a lock on it and the Zika virus has a key,” he says. “But in Culex pipiens, we showed that the virus doesn’t have the correct key to open up those cells and begin to replicate.”

In another local mosquito species Aliota tested, the Zika virus was able to enter the midgut, but only when viral concentrations were much higher than they would ever be in nature. Even so, since

the virus was not disseminated into other tissues, transmission did not occur.

Aliota jokingly describes these kinds of vector competence studies as “payback time” for all the mosquito bites he’s ever suffered; to count Zika viral copy numbers in test mosquitoes, Aliota has to rip off their legs.

THE ZIKA EPIDEMIC Perhaps the most dangerous mosquito on the planet, Aedes aegypti is the primary vector for not one, but four different viruses: yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and Zika.

According to the World Health Organization, the Zika virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947, but no major outbreak occurred until 2007. By that time, the virus had spread from Africa to the Pacific Islands—most likely via globetrotting human hosts—and had experienced a few genetic changes along the way. When the Asian version of the Zika virus reached the Americas sometime between 2007 and 2015, it encountered a large human population that had never before been exposed to it, resulting in more than 540,000 suspected and almost 200,000 confirmed Zika cases to date.

Much like West Nile fever, a Zika infection in adults is asymptomatic 80% of the time, and hence unlikely to be detected outside of systematic population screenings. The other 20% of cases typically have mild symptoms, such as a fever, skin rash, joint pain, or red itchy eyes. Rarely, a poorly understood neurological condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome can cause muscle weakness and temporary paralysis in Zika-infected adults.

What pushed Zika into the public health emergency category is the devastating result of an infection during pregnancy. Because of its ability to travel from a mother’s cells to her baby’s through the placenta, the virus causes a wide range of birth defects known as congenital Zika syndrome. According to a 2016 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, this is especially remarkable because “the last time an infectious pathogen (rubella virus) caused an epidemic of congenital defects was more than fifty years ago.”

Many babies born to Zika-infected mothers have hearing or vision problems, some of which may not become apparent until years later, or deformations of their limbs or skull. At the extreme end of congenital Zika syndrome is microcephaly, the abnormally small head of newborns whose heartbreaking images have brought Zika global attention. Some parts of the world have reported much higher numbers of microcephaly than others, prompting researchers to study whether a combination of environmental factors and Zika infection may play a causal role.

With about 2,400 cases of congenital Zika syndrome since 2015, Brazil has seen an especially dramatic spike in infant microcephaly.

At a conference in the fall of 2015, Brazilian scientists reached out to UW–Madison professor of pathology and laboratory medicine David O’Connor for help in explaining this distressing observation.

O’Connor, an HIV/AIDS researcher who had hardly even heard of the Zika virus until then, soon found himself leading a fast-paced and intellectually stimulating research collaboration unlike any that he, Matthew Aliota, and their colleagues in Wisconsin and abroad had ever before experienced.

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Shanna Wolf Photography

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Researchers in David O’Connors lab contribute to the Zika Experimental Science Team: (left to right) Michelle Koenig, Laurel Stewart, Matt Semler, Christina Newman, David O’Connor, Dawn Dudley, Andrea Weiler, and Meghan Breitbach.

Under the name ZEST (Zika Experimental Science Team), O’Connor assembled experts in mosquito-borne diseases, virology, immunology, radiology, placenta biology, obstetrics, maternal-fetal medicine, and pediatrics, to better understand how the virus impacts human health. The team went from hardly knowing each other in late 2015 to “communicating almost every waking minute since then,” says Aliota.

O’Connor hit the ground running because his team was experienced in working with infected mosquitoes, mice, and monkeys and had access to facilities that meet all necessary biosafety certifications, including the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center.

The team also benefited from long-standing relationships with researchers from Colombia and Brazil.

“It really is a community effort,” O’Connor says, “because we’re all aligned to the same goal, which is trying to minimize the impact of Zika on women, their babies, and everybody else.” Aliota adds that “UW–Madison is uniquely positioned to tackle a multidisciplinary project like this. Few institutions around the globe can take on this kind of problem the way we can.”

Just as unique was a decision the ZEST group made early on: to share all the data from their animal experiments in real time through an online, open-access data portal. O’Connor had come to appreciate the ability of real-time data sharing to speed up scientific progress in 2014, when a Harvard colleague used the Internet to share genetic data from Ebola patient samples.

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“For samples that are hard to collect for one reason or another, there is an extra impetus to share data as soon as it becomes available,” O’Connor says. Not only does this “open science” model accelerate progress, it also mitigates ethical concerns about conducting experiments on non-human primates to improve human health.

“We need to make sure that every [research] animal gives us as much information as possible,” O’Connor says, noting that the sharing of experimental designs and results can help prevent unnecessary duplication of animal experiments at multiple institutions. His team may be the first to push this concept of open science to its far edge, but O’Connor is convinced that other labs will soon follow.

When researchers began to address some basic, but critically important questions about Zika, some of their answers were unexpected: Of all the Aedes-transmitted viruses, Zika is the only one to also be transmitted sexually, similar to HIV/AIDS; and the duration of an active viral infection was almost seven times longer in pregnant rhesus macaque monkeys, compared to their non-pregnant counterparts—a finding that was shocking to the ZEST team that first reported it.

Loren Galvao, a global health physician at UW–Milwaukee who hails from Brazil, was as surprised as many others to learn of Zika’s dual transmission routes. “A disease that is both mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted adds another layer of complexity to

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“ W e are continually being challenged with these new viruses that are emerging seemingly from nowhere.

But there’s some predictable pattern that we can use to assess the risk in much the same way as we forecast the weather.”

David O’Connor

prevention efforts,” she says. “But despite the greater challenges, I think we have learned a lot from HIV, Ebola and malaria and will be able to apply those lessons to Zika.”

SCIENCE VS. BUG Zika still holds many surprises for researchers. But the progress they have made on other Aedes-transmitted diseases provides them with a solid foundation for limiting not only the spread of this deadly mosquito, but also obstructing its viral delivery by using strategies that go beyond insect repellents and protective clothing.

For example, the Eliminate Dengue Program (EDP), an international scientific collaboration headed by Scott O’Neill at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is utilizing an interesting approach to preventing mosquito-borne disease. Back in 1993, O’Neill had the brilliant idea of enlisting the common Wolbachia pipientis bacterium as a weapon against Aedes-transmitted diseases.

Wolbachia pipientis, which occurs naturally in 60% of insects, isn’t found in Aedes aegypti. But O’Neill identified a particular strain of the bacteria called wMel whose introduction reduces the reproductive success of Aedes aegypti populations. It works like this: After male and female mosquitoes have been infected with wMel in the lab, matings between infected males and uninfected females produce eggs that simply don’t hatch, thereby terminating the mosquito life cycle. Matings between any males and infected females, however, produce normal numbers of offspring, all of whom also carry wMel. When the first batch of lab-raised, wMel-infected mosquitoes is released into a wild population as a biological vector control strategy, the effect on subsequent generations is small. But after about ten weeks of regular releases, wMel continues to drive itself into the wild population so that the vast majority of mosquitoes in the target region will eventually carry it.

While this strategy doesn’t eliminate the entire mosquito population (which would be bad for the ecosystem), EDP showed that the introduction of wMel renders the bugs unable to transmit dengue virus. According to Aliota, the exact mechanism behind this is not yet clear, but a simple competition for the mosquito’s cellular resources may be at play.

“If one pathogen comes into your body and takes over, it’s unlikely to allow something else to come in,” says UW–Parkside’s Daphne Pham. As a molecular biologist who studies Aedes aegypti, Pham understands the constant battle between host and parasite. “It’s harder for a second pathogen to come in and take away the nutrition [source from] the first one,” she explains.

Whether it is competition for resources or a more complex mechanism, the wMel strategy appears to be remarkably effective in the lab. It is also safe for humans since wMel is too large to enter a mosquito’s salivary glands. Therefore, EDP is currently evaluating whether the release of wMel-infected mosquitoes in several field trial locations reduces dengue infection rates in human populations.

Since Aliota and colleagues recently demonstrated that wMel also blocks the transmission of chikungunya and Zika virus in the lab, this strategy has the potential to protect humans and animals from multiple Aedes-transmitted diseases.

There will almost certainly be more of these diseases down the road, O’Connor says, which is why he hopes to identify other viruses in non-human primates that have not yet caused a human health threat—but might in the future.

“We are continually being challenged with these new viruses that are emerging seemingly from nowhere. But there’s some predictable pattern that we can use to assess the risk in much the same way as we forecast the weather,” O’Connor says, adding that neither the weather forecast nor predictions of new and harmful viruses need to be right 100% of the time in order to be useful.

As an HIV/AIDS researcher who has witnessed first-hand the impact of drug treatments on a once-fatal disease, O’Connor is optimistic that science is our best weapon against mosquito-borne diseases. “I’ve seen in my career what a lot of people working together can do to change the face of an infectious disease,” he says.

“And I think more of these public health triumphs are in our future.”

Silke Schmidt is a Madison-based science writer for UW–Madison. She has also written about energy, medical research, education, economics and the environment for UW–Milwaukee, North Carolina State University and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. Her multimedia work has appeared in Madison Magazine and on WPR.

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Mollie Oblinger, incrustations render the surface, 2015. Veneer, wood, marker 22 x 19 x 5 inches.

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TO THE QUARRY, TOGETHER

BY C. KUBASTA

W

hen poets and visual artists work together, they negotiate a shared language. In collaboration,

they explore how their work, well, works together: both engage with form and shape, utilize symbolic thought, and explore metaphor of various kinds. Materials change and mutate in the hands of artists, and often come to their final forms after many revisions and drafts, possible versions begun and set aside. Art exists in the friction—the frisson—between idea and making, in the often never-fully -complete translation between the inception of an idea (which is always perfect because it’s unmade) and the fruition of that idea. It’s a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle that calls us back to the blinking screen, the empty table, the blank wall.

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Squirrel Memory Another girl, third grade (like me), brought it: center section, glossy, split open and edible— (I tried not to look) This cartoon, this amateur dissection, this old woman creased by stretch marks, crossed by the kitchen knife’s clean swipes.

I want to have a squirrel memory, find that year later, like a dollar bill in a jacket pocket (this poem worthless if not forgotten for a time)— “The ‘facts’ of the Gein case are simple. He was found out the night of November 16th, 1957, after the disappearance of Bernice Worden. Convicted, years later, of her murder, and no others.”  My body became that body—in dreams, in nightmare, in memory. Even now, I recall the center cut, the missing triangle. I was eight, and it had begun: the boys threw rocks at we three girls with breasts already.

“The strange artifacts found in his home … largely the fruits of his cemetery expeditions, where he opened graves and removed the contents.” Yes, I’m referencing myself. Little girl becoming woman dreams of the offending bits cut off. Those girls held me against the brick wall, out of sight of the playground monitor, and I shook with terror— terror of “becoming,” not of him.

C. Kubasta from All Beautiful & Useless

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Because of this shared language and love of frisson, poets and visual artists can learn a lot from each other. I became more aware of this during work on my collection of poems, All Beautiful & Useless, published in 2015. I had begun many of the poems years earlier, and obsessively worked and reworked them. But I felt there was something missing from this collection, yet couldn’t put my finger on what that was.

Some of the poems center around a story I’d heard growing up in my hometown of Wautoma that sounded too awful to be true.

The crimes of Edward Gein, a murderer and grave robber who made home furnishings from human body parts, haunted me as a girl. And the fact that his crimes had happened here (or near here, one town over in Plainfield), made it that much worse. In my poem “Squirrel Memory,” I lay out the facts of Gein’s crimes, and I call them “simple.” But his crimes, like my memory of learning about them, were anything but simple. In the poem, I recall how a thirdgrade classmate showed me Judge Robert H. Gollmar’s gruesome book about Ed Gein with its photo-filled “center section, glossy, split open and edible.”

My memory of this event forms the title of the poem, and comes from a later line as well: “I want to have a squirrel memory, find that year later, / like a dollar bill in a jacket pocket.” I remembered and forgot what I saw on the playground that day of third grade for years and years. As that image of the “squirrel memory” suggests, it is only in in re-finding that memory years later (like a buried acorn) that I could make sense of it. My child’s experience of those images, and the story they told, couldn’t be understood. This suggests one way

Opposite page: Mollie Oblinger, diverted to fructify, 2015.

Fabric, wood, 48 x 24 x 5 inches.

Below: Mollie Oblinger, above the highest standlines, 2015.

Photograph, watercolor, 16 x 20 inches.

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Beneath Lies What

i.

Language constructs reality in an obvious way: it provides some terms [formicary] [eusocial] [oligogyny] and not others with which to talk about the world.

You must find a place where they live. The earth, mandible-chewed, composite-with-what, will have-been-stacked, will have-slid, so there is a hole and a place where the ground looks alive.

You must have something solid, but in-its-form liquid, which pours. You must learn the art of waiting. You must not rush. You must learn the art of digging. You must learn the art of digging gently You may choose zinc, plaster, or aluminum. You must choose how to display your casting. You must choose how much awe to reveal (how much embarrassment at your awe to reveal) once it is washed and shined. Once the finely-haired roots are picked off. Once the hole is filled. Once you’ve realized why you could not kill them in the regular ways. Once you’ve realized what you’ve done to have this thing for your own holding. ii.

We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

The walls are cinderblock, a line of cinderblock squares. And I know the people on both sides.

They know the people on both sides. They know the people on both sides. We mostly know each other.

There are no windows, but one of them has a hammer drill. S/he will let you use the hammer drill. You can drill holes and hang pictures and pretend the cinderblock squares are more than cinderblock squares. You hang pictures of skeletal hands, and bodies in motion stopped, and although it is no window, it is a kind of window, a window into what may be underneath. iii.

If you could make a casting of that that would be a wondrous thing.

In another square, cinderblock or not, someone made what is underneath no longer underneath, and it is something we have too many words for: [authorities have not disclosed a motive ] [a candlelight vigil is scheduled Tuesday night] [we are not going to speculate on a motive]. And we can imagine the casting because we’ve constructed that reality in obvious ways.

C. Kubasta

Mollie Oblinger, underlaid with flotsam, 2010.

Mdf, polymer clay, beads, 40 x 69 x 2 inches.

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that art can allow us to understand experience: it can allow us the necessary distance to revisit something terrifying and confusing.

Once we’ve fashioned something into language and metaphor, it becomes less able to traumatize. The work of constructing the poem gave me power over that moment.

Yet, even as strong as “Squirrel Memory” and these poems other were on their own, the sense that they were somehow a collection eluded me. They seemed like fragments, memories that were somehow incomplete. That is, until I met someone who would help me think differently about my work.

I

was introduced to an artist named Mollie Oblinger at an art gallery opening of a mutual friend in Green Lake, Wisconsin. I got to talking with this woman wearing fabulous vintage cat-eye glasses, and learned that Mollie taught art and sculpture at nearby Ripon College. As this was a Friday in Wisconsin, a small group of us adjourned to a nearby tavern for fish fry. We sat at picnic tables alongside the Fox River near a place where sturgeon are known to spawn every spring. Over napkins weighted down with rocks and tartar sauce squeeze bottles, we talked about poetry, art, and smalltown stories. Mollie and I were the only non-couple there, so when the waitress was sorting out receipts, she asked if we were together.

“Not yet,” Mollie replied with a smile, “but it’s going well.

Later, looking at Mollie’s website, I was struck by how her work was so firmly rooted in place, in landscape, in the lines of shore and water and drift. I could almost feel the breeze off of Lake Michigan, walking the shore and gathering smooth grey stones from the frothed high wave mark, the bits of driftwood and scattered reed underfoot.

But her colors were so saturated—fuchsia and teal and deep mustard—as to be almost artificial-looking, a palette that had never been sun- or water-washed. She’d taken (it seemed to me) the suggestions of landscape and manipulated them into something other. The pieces had titles like that had lain torpid or underlaid with flotsam that seemed to be part of some larger narrative or fragment of memory, asking to be remembered. Perhaps, like I had done with “Squirrel Memory,” she’d exerted some control over the found material of experience, asserting her own aesthetic.

In my own work, I often play with narrative and fragments as well. Revisiting the self I was when I first learned the Ed Gein story led me to think about the way girls tell and understand stories. My third-grade self was transfixed by the photographs of Gein’s victim and (there’s no other way to say this) her body. Growing up as I did, it was common to see a deer carcass hung in a tree or garage. So, as a child, the image of Bernice Worden’s body became mixed up with other images: a road kill doe my father hung in the garage and salvaged for the meat, and her twin fawns that we preserved for the high school science classroom.

Often when we don’t understand something, we’re left with fragments. As a poet (and an adult), I found myself revisiting these fragments of memory to write the poems that reconstructed my childhood memories.

I

sent Mollie some of my poems, wondering if our fragments might somehow speak to each other. She had just returned to Wisconsin

from a residency at Playa in Oregon with a group of other artists, scientists, and writers, and she was looking for a similar community here. I was newly inspired by the stories of my hometown, Wautoma, but looking to expand my creative circle as well. We were both looking for each other, perhaps.

We continued our “getting to know you” process, which had multiple parts. First, sharing our work: I visited her home and studio space to see her sculptures, which contain organic and off-puttingly inorganic elements. What looks touchable and inviting is often molded and unyielding. There’s a mix of soft materials (felt, yarn) in glaring colors. Natural materials like wood are painted with latex or polymer. The natural and the synthetic bed down together. And her studio space is a “perfect white cube” (her words) with fluorescent lights.

Mollie explains her use of color as a palette of maps and charts “whose purpose is to make the contrast obvious.” Her sculpture work explores the natural environment, often with a close eye on human intervention. These intersections, alterations, and manipulations can come in the shape of a reservoir or changing drought patterns. Sometimes she’ll layer photographs of a crust of dried mud with a panoramic vista. Much of her work plays with the intersections between the world-as-is and the world as we make it.

In a happy coincidence, just prior to my visit to Mollie’s studio the manuscript that would become All Beautiful & Useless was accepted for publication. My publisher indicated that he would be open to having original artwork on both the cover and interior pages.

Mollie’s work seemed to have some correspondences to mine, but in a way that wasn’t literal; this seemed an opportunity for us.

It was important for both of us, to not think of our work as any kind of illustration or depiction. If Mollie was to provide artwork for my poetry, I wouldn’t want it to be any kind of accompaniment.

If at some point in the future, I could provide poetry or text for her, I wouldn’t want it to be descriptive or decorative. For both of us, the point of collaboration wouldn’t be to explain—or make the other’s work more accessible.

B

efore we dove into any kind of collaboration, I needed to know if my new friend was Wisconsin enough. I devised a test that included a rope-swing leap into a swimming hole and a visit to the Amish store for the only appropriate choice of ice cream. She got it right: Blue Moon. And while she might have worn water shoes (she was worried the swimming hole could be rocky) she more than made up for it by making refrigerator pickles with the pickling spice she got at the Amish store.

As we munched on pickles and pondered collaborating on the book, I showed Mollie a poem with a number of lines redacted that I hoped to place toward the front of the collection. It was a complete poem, and at the last minute, before submitting, I blacked out whole sections, like redacted letters sent home from war. There are actual letters under those heavy black shapes, of course. But they form words that I couldn’t bring myself to print, and a story too dear, too painful, and perhaps too malicious for publication. It was one of the poems that drew Mollie into the text.

It might seem strange to publish a poem with swaths of text blacked out. But, if we’re being honest, the stories we “know” (or

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claim to know) are always redacted because they are our versions of ourselves. In many ways I began All Beautiful & Useless in order to draw attention to this simple yet often unexpressed truth: The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are full of missing pieces.

That first day of sharing our work, Mollie showed me some photographs she’d been playing with, cutting strips out of the landscapes with an Exacto knife and re-weaving these missing pieces back into the antecedent image. We decided to explore this process to create a frontispiece for each section of the book. Mollie started with a black and white landscape photograph that played with the original image, dissected it, shadowed the missing parts, and in some cases, re-wove missing parts back into the page.

In my book, we used these pieces to introduce sections that include the voices of the accusing girls at Salem, poems that half-tell stories about growing up girl in rural Wisconsin, and a final section that revisits those childhood stories of Ed Gein. Each of Mollie’s pieces suggests the ideas of remembering and re-membering: pieces hobbled together to re-tell stories that are dear and harrowing.

The sudden strangeness of the ordinary, occasioned by looking anew at something we’ve seen before, runs through Mollie’s work, too. It is part of why I was drawn to the image we chose for the book cover, diverted to fructify. What appears skeletal—perhaps a ribcage—is not. What appears thinly made, like spun plastic, looks porous under closer inspections, almost as if it would give if touched by a finger.

Mollie made diverted to fructify after researching California’s historic drought in preparation for an exhibit at a college in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The shape of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta is the red porous form that slumps over itself in the face of plans (the “ribcage”) to channel its water down state. While her work examines specific locations, the issues Mollie explores are universal. For instance, the battle for water in California is not unlike the one raging in the Central Sands Region of Wisconsin.

S

Mollie Oblinger, interred by their own debris #4 (top), #6 (bottom), 2015. Paper and transparencies, 14 x 11 inches.

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ince All Beautiful & Useless was published in 2015, I’ve traveled and given readings, and have talked with poets, students, and teachers around the country. Often these conversations fall into two categories. There’s the normal talk about the poems—the subjects, metaphors, and imagery of my work, which are unabashedly rural Wisconsin. Sometimes the conversation stops there. But every so often there’s a pivot into the “flyover country” conversation that begins: How can you write there? The juxtaposition of a person holding your book (which is chock full of poems about there) suggesting you face a dearth of material simply because of where you live is unbelievably comic.

But I know what they’re really asking. And I know enough not to laugh.

Finding a creative community can be a little more difficult for artists and writers who choose to live in rural or small communities. But it’s necessary to have someone to push us to look beneath, behind, and beyond. Maybe there’s a season for it, and a place, like those sturgeon-spawning sites along the Fox River. I’m lucky to have stumbled upon Mollie, and I probably should have placed less importance on whether she liked Blue Moon ice cream.

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This last summer, I picked Mollie up and told her to bring those water shoes. We went swimming in a nearby quarry, part of this place’s history that appeals to me and a landscape I thought would appeal to her. I thought she should see and know more about the quarries, the people who worked them, the stories beneath the waters and the dangers they still harbor. Back in the woods are smaller quarries where tragedies happen semi-regularly. The locals say it’s only out-of-towners who get in trouble—they don’t know what they’re doing.

As a kid, we were warned to never swim in the quarries; a warning that had as much to do with the dangers of drowning as what else we might encounter there, the kinds of exploration and celebration that haunt parents’ dreams (especially the parents of girls). But Mollie and I went, grown women on a sunny day to dip into the still water, where the cut away and blasted granite faces mirrored themselves.

As we skittered along the rocky ledges, Mollie gave me advice on some animation programs I could use to experiment with some new poetry forms; we had a polite disagreement about some proposed legislation. We’re still friends. She still updates me about gallery shows for us to go to, and still mocks me when I wax poetic about pan-fried squirrel. I send her links to journals seeking collaborative work and residencies that want poets and artists to work together.

Perhaps the evidence of a successful collaboration can be found in the moments when we think of each other; that is, think of our own work and the impetus of our work through each other.

Any agreement, common law or codified, rests on the mutual contribution of the parties who work together for some common purpose. In our case, the ongoing relationship urges both artist and poet to engage with new forms, new subjects, new platforms—and with each other. It’s not always easy. True collaboration requires an intimacy and vulnerability not easily achieved, not easily undone.

ZULU TIME KAMBUI OLUJIMI: ZULU TIME OPENS MAY 6 FREE ADMISSION 227 STATE STREET mmoca.org Kambui Olujimi, Untitled (detail), from the series T-Minus Ø, 2017. Digital print on cotton, aluminum pole, zinc pole mount. Flag: 24 x 36 inches; pole: 72 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Mollie Oblinger is an artist whose works investigate the environment. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at Furman University in South Carolina and Sierra College in California. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

12 CONCE R T S

ALPHABET SOUP JUNE 9 - 25, 2017

BachDancingandDynamite.org | 608.255.9866

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Lynn Ellen Mattison Raley

C. Kubasta is the author the chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s, and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015). She is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and serves as Assistant Poetry editor with Brain Mill Press.

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Essay

BUS RIDE

BY B.J. HOLLARS

O

n a sunny autumn morning in 2011, I found myself facing a room full of African-American literature students at the University of Alabama.

I’d recently completed my graduate work there, and had stayed on as an instructor in the English Department to teach composition, creative writing, and the occasional course on American literature. If you had asked me at the time why I signed up to teach this class, I couldn’t have told you. Today, that is a different story.

White and Colored waiting room signs at a Trailways bus station in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1960.

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Burk Uzzle/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division LC-U9- 4136-8

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Essay

Though the class catalog read, Instructor: Hollars, I knew better than to situate myself as the learned, august professor dispensing wisdom from above. The problem wasn’t that I was a white person teaching African-American literature. Rather, the problem was that I was a young, creative writer who had never even taken the class I’d signed up to teach. Acutely aware of my limitations, I made it clear to my students on the very first day that I was hardly the perfect person to teach the course. By the perplexed looks I received from my majority black class, they seemed to be aware of my limitations as well.

While my lack of experience with African-American literature was certainly a concern, every day when I walked into the classroom I was confronted with another: What could a 26-year-old white guy from Indiana possibly know about the black experience in America, past or present?

That fall semester I listened more than I talked, pondered more than I pontificated, and, by term’s end, began to understand what it meant to be a student of color at a major university in the American South. I began to learn, too, just how much I didn’t know. Indeed, we hurtled through the canon, marveling at the endurance of Elizabeth Keckley, the fire of Frederick Douglass, the subtlety of Nella Larsen, and the profound power of Langston Hughes. With each text, the students and I grappled with our past and present, engaging in several meandering digressions centered on what these works might teach 21st century citizens such as ourselves.

As students began sharing their personal experiences, I felt their palpable pride at being part of a culture that had contributed so much to the American experience—even though it may have seemed that America at times has not reciprocated that pride.

I also became aware of an underlying fear that resided deep within many of these college students, a fear of racial slurs hurled their way from a dorm room window, or chalked on the sidewalks beneath their feet.

“There’s no avoiding it,” one student shrugged. “We live our lives wondering when we’ll get it next.”

DEPARTURE Five years after my teaching stint at University of Alabama, the words of that student were on my mind as I sat at a table full of strangers during a book festival in Eau Claire. Over dinner we became engaged in a conversation about race and America. A man named Charlie Bauer, who was seated next to me, turned and asked, “You ever heard of a guy named Jim Zwerg?”

“Is he local?” I replied.

“Used to be,” said Bauer. “He was the associate pastor of our church here in town. Just a few years after his time as a Freedom Rider.”

While I didn’t recognize Zwerg ’s name, I knew about a few of the over four hundred riders who boarded Greyhound and Trailways buses in the summer of 1961 to protest rampant, institutionalized racism in the segregated South. Two Supreme Court decisions—1946’s Morgan vs. Virginia and 1960’s Boynton vs.

Virginia—had ruled in favor of integrated, interstate bus travel.

Yet, despite these rulings, in many southern cities social custom

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trumped legislation. Freedom Riders sought to test the enforcement of these rulings, often risking their lives in the process.

“You should give Jim a call,” Bauer suggested, “I bet he’d have a few things to tell you about civil rights.”

These days, Jim Zwerg is a hard man to find. After leaving Eau Claire for Arizona in 1971, he spent the remainder of his professional life working for the Congregational church, charities, and in corporate community relations. After retiring in 1993, Zwerg and his wife retreated to a cabin in rural New Mexico, where they still live today.

Before I had even met Jim Zwerg, I came to know his face very well. So have many others who have come to know the story of the Freedom Riders. That’s because of a rather famous photo of Zwerg when he was a young man. In it, the Appleton native leans against the edge of a building, his striped tie slightly askew, blood splattered across his suit coat. Eyes down, Zwerg studies the blood on his sleeve as if questioning how it got there. Certainly a person or group of people is to blame, though there’s no hint of their presence in the photo. All it shows is the aftermath of their presence: a man, beaten and bloodied.

If we were somehow to remove the blood—to expunge it from the frame—the photo might be mistaken for a print ad for a high-end watch company. But there is no erasing a story written in blood, whether Zwerg’s story or the thousands of others that make up the struggle for civil rights.

Zwerg’s civil rights story began in the fall of 1958, when the eighteen-year-old from Appleton first stepped foot onto the Beloit College campus. Bags in tow, Zwerg entered his dorm room to find one of his two roommates already there, a black student named Bob Carter. The two became fast friends.

Zwerg recalls how quickly he became aware of instances of racial prejudice directed at Carter. “We’d go to the commons to have a meal and people would get up from the table to leave, and there were these excessive tiffs during basketball or football intramural games. People made comments just loud enough for him to hear.”

Throughout the fall and spring of his freshman year, Zwerg observed instances of discrimination spilling into the city as well, including one situation in which a barber refused Carter service— he didn’t cut “Negro” hair. Zwerg was puzzled by such explicit instances of racism, though even more puzzled by Carter’s muted response.

“How do you take it?” Zwerg asked one day while the pair lounged in their dorm room. “Why don’t you do something?”

Carter’s eyes flicked toward Zwerg, and, after a moment of contemplation, he marched toward his dresser. Removing a copy of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Stride Toward Freedom, he encouraged his roommate to give it a read.

Zwerg did, and what he found inside proved life-changing: Dr. King’s blueprint for the strategy employed throughout the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott—the thirteen-month demonstration that led to a federal ruling, and later, a Supreme Court decision, both of which confirmed the unconstitutionality of segregated buses. For Zwerg, Dr. King’s book was more than a history lesson; it was a plan for the future. A plan that now included him.

Essay

ARRIVAL

Getty images/Bettman # 514682998

Throughout his time at Beloit, Zwerg ’s interest in civil rights continued to grow, ultimately spurring him to apply—and be admitted to—a one-semester exchange program Beloit College shared with Fisk University in Nashville.

It was January of 1961, and evidence of segregation was everywhere, from “colored only” bathrooms and drinking fountains to “whites only” signs hung above restaurants and movie theaters.

But signs of resistance were also everywhere. Zwerg noticed a dozen or so well-dressed demonstrators standing quietly outside the theater. They wore no placards, sang no Freedom songs, and instead, simply stood where they weren’t welcome.

Baffled by their reserved demeanor, Zwerg crossed the street and asked their spokesman how such a seemingly understated display could ever prove effective.

Tw e n t y - y e a r - o l d J o h n L e w i s — t h e f u t u r e congressman and civil rights icon—eyed the white student and deemed his question sincere.

“If you want to follow us back to the church,” Lewis said, “I’d be happy to talk to you.”

In the weeks that followed, Zwerg took part in lunch counter sit-ins and movie theater demonstrations, and also found himself on the receiving end of a wellplaced punch as a result of his activism.

“When violence occurred, it followed a format.”

Zwerg says. “And I was usually the first focus. They wanted the white male. I was the traitor of the white race.”

Zwerg’s willingness to endure physical violence for the cause didn’t go unnoticed. Diane Nash, John Lewis, and other Nashville Student Movement leaders took careful note of Brother Jim—the rare white man who used his privilege as a target rather than a shield.

UNSCHEDULED STOP As Zwerg continued demonstrating in Nashville, nine-hundred miles away in New York, James Farmer, the newly installed executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was busily making the final preparations for the first Freedom Ride. An interstate bus journey from Washington DC to New Orleans with stops along the way, the Freedom Ride was designed to bring public attention to unconstitutionally segregated bus and rail stations in some southern states. On the morning of May 4, 1961, thirteen Riders (seven black and six white) boarded a pair of buses, well aware of the dangers they might encounter by testing the enforcement—or lack thereof—of the law.

Ten days into their journey, they were rocked by violence. One bus was set aflame outside of Anniston, Alabama, followed hours later by an attack on the riders of the second bus when it stopped at a Birmingham bus terminal.

Freedom Rider James Zwerg remained bleeding in the street for over an hour because Montgomery paramedics refused to treat him.

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UWEC Photography

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UW–Eau Claire students share a moment of reflection at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Designed by Maya Lin, the Memorial features a circular black granite table that holds the names of the martyrs and chronicles the history of the movement.

Upon learning of the violence, Jim Zwerg and several other Nashville Student Movement members committed themselves to continuing the journey. To halt the rides, they feared, would serve only to embolden their perpetrators and confirm that violence was indeed the surest way to prevent future civil rights demonstrations.

On the evening of May 16—the night before boarding the buses— Zwerg placed a call to his parents in Appleton. Previously, he’d been discrete about his civil rights work, but he knew he could hardly join the Freedom Rides without informing his parents.

“I wanted to tell them how much I loved them,” Zwerg explains.

“And to thank them for bringing me up the way they did. I guess I was naively hoping that I would get the kind of sendoff that the young soldier gets—‘We’re proud of you son, God bless you, keep safe.’ And … I didn’t get that.”

Zwerg had hardly finished announcing his impending travels when Mary Zwerg interrupted her son.

“You can’t do that,” she told him. “You’re throwing away your education. … And do you know what you’ll do to your father?”

They’d raised him to be an honest person, to stand up to injustice.

How could he turn away from that now?

“Mom,” Zwerg said, “I’ve never been so sure. This is what God wants me to do.”

“You’ll kill your father,” she said, slamming the phone into its cradle.

The following morning, Zwerg got on the bus.

By the time Zwerg and the other Nashville-based Freedom Riders boarded the buses, they had all seen pictures of the smoke billowing from the Greyhound just off the Anniston highway, pictures of the angry faces of the white men as they pummeled a toppled Rider in the Birmingham bus terminal.

In an effort to avoid more violence, President Kennedy and his administration struck a deal with Alabama Governor John Patterson, who agreed to protect the Riders during their brief stint in the state. As such, on the morning of May 20, the Freedom Riders received an unprecedented law enforcement escort as they cut deeper into the Heart of Dixie.

“We had a plane going overhead,” Zwerg recalls, “we had squad cars, we had motorcycles.”

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That is, until the bus reached the outskirts of Montgomery. As their escorts peeled away one by one, the Freedom Riders began to realize that they were exposed.

Zwerg turned to his seatmate, John Lewis, to find him just waking from his nap. Lewis watched as the last patrol car pulled out of sight, then said, “That’s not good.”

The bus eased into Montgomery’s Greyhound Station on South Court Street at around 10:20 am, and, though they feared for their lives, the Freedom Riders had no choice but to disembark. Uncertain of what was to come, Zwerg followed the others who were huddled around a group of reporters.

“John was just stepping forward to address the press,” Zwerg says, “and this fella—I think he was a used car salesman as I recall, and a Klansmen—went at one of the fellas [who was holding] a parabolic mic, grabbed it, and threw it to the ground.”

Zwerg watched in horror as others came bearing bricks and pipes and chains—all of which were used indiscriminately. The women attacked female Riders with their purses, the men attacked the male Riders who tried to intervene. The following day’s edition of the Anniston Star described the “howling mobs of white people,” some two hundred strong, that raged for two hours.

Eyes closed, Zwerg prayed to God for the strength to remain nonviolent in the midst of mortal danger. But he prayed, too, for the attackers, pleading with God to forgive them.

“And that’s when I had this incredible religious experience of feeling surrounded by love and peace,” Zwerg says, his voice wavering. “I just had this assurance that no matter what happened I was going to be okay.”

Zwerg was okay, eventually. Though, the now-famous image that ran on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser only manages to capture a fraction of his injuries: cracked vertebrae, fractured teeth, blunt force trauma to his head.

Zwerg spent several days in a Montgomery hospital, and, in the midst of his delirium, agreed to a hospital bed interview. In the grainy footage, a black-eyed Zwerg can be heard saying, “We’re dedicated to this. We’ll take hitting, we’ll take beating.” And then, as his half-closed eyes flutter toward the camera, he delivers his most powerful line: “We’re willing to accept death.”

Essay

In that moment, his words undoubtedly held great weight—a signal to his fellow Freedom Riders, as well as the nation, that violence would never deter them. Years later, Zwerg admits that because of the trauma to his head he hardly remembers any of that interview. Yet when prompted to speak to the camera, he relied upon the words he’d so often heard before, words that had become the mantra of the movement: that there was no turning back, not ever.

They would continue forward, no matter the price.

TRANSFER

David Goldman/AP Photo

Due to his serious injuries, Zwerg never completed his Freedom Ride—a regret that has stayed with him to this day. Yet as a result of the unwavering commitment demonstrated by Zwerg and many others, in the fall of 1961 “white” and “colored” signs were removed from bus terminals throughout the South. Time and again, the Supreme Court had ruled that separate was not equal, and, finally, the last public vestiges of a flawed doctrine were coming down.

Fifty-five years later, in the spring of 2016, I take my seat alongside a hundred or so University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire students and colleagues for our nine-day Civil Rights Pilgrimage. Founded in 2008 and organized by Associate Dean of Students Jodi-Thesing Ritter, this annual 3,000-mile bus trip through the southern states provides students and faculty with an opportunity to see the American civil rights movement through the eyes of a Freedom Rider.

The pilgrimage is a great way to see history come alive, and our eyes and minds are widened in Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, New Orleans, and Little Rock. Though, I’m most moved by our time in Atlanta. It’s there, in the basement of the Georgia Tech student center, where we meet seventy-five-year-old Freedom Rider Charles Person. Person was just eighteen on May 14, 1961, when he and others were brutally beaten in the Birmingham bus terminal.

At the time, Person was a freshman at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. Even though he was a gifted math and physics student who dreamed of a career as a scientist, Person was refused admission to the all-white Georgia Institute of Technology. Born and raised in

Atlanta, Person had felt his entire life the degrading effects of segregation. While at Morehouse, he became active in the Atlanta sit-in movement to integrate segregated lunch counters in early 1961 and was sentenced to sixteen days in jail as a result. After the Freedom Rides, Person joined the US Marines in late 1961, retiring after two decades of active service to his country. Since returning to Georgia, Person has worked as a technology supervisor for Atlanta’s public schools.

On the morning we meet, Person is decked out in a tuxedo adorned with military medals, fitting attire for a decorated Marine and lifelong fighter for freedom and social justice.

“My real wish in life,” Charles tells our assembled group, “is that at some point we could have a sit down—a cup of coffee or a slice of pizza—with the people who beat us. I was five-foot-six-inches and 126 pounds,” he says, shaking his head. “For them to have that much venom toward people they have never met before, … I’d like to have a sit down and ask, Why?” The students and I sit spellbound as Person shares his story: what it was like growing up black in a segregated community, the bus ride and beating in the Birmingham terminal, how these and other events firmed his resolve to seek racial equity. And how despite it all, he—much like Jim Zwerg—never gave up, never turned back, and never doubted that people can change the world for the better if they just try hard enough.

“It was easy for us to get on the bus, but now it’s up to you,” he tells us, as if to say there is still a long road ahead that will require perhaps a different kind of Freedom Rider.

Person sweeps the room with his eyes. He seems to be addressing our little group from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but he is looking directly at me when he asks, “What would you get on the bus for?”

B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds (2016) and the forthcoming The Ride Rolls On: Rediscovering the Freedom Riders on The Road South (2018). Hollars is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and the executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild.

Charles Person, the youngest of the thirteen Freedom Riders who integrated interstate bus stations in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, did not realize at the time that what he was doing was any more significant than sit-ins he took part in.

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@ THE Watrous Gallery

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@ THE Watrous Gallery

THE FAIRYTALES OF

GRIMM & LITHERLAND

BY DIANE M. BACHA

G

erit Grimm and Gina Litherland are contemporary Wisconsin artists inspired by the imaginations of

long ago. Though one works in clay and the other in oil, one in unglazed and earthy monotone and the other in lusciously lacquered color, both turn to folklore and fairy-

tale to express truths.

Gina Litherland, In Bloom (for Marosa di Giorgio), 2012. Oil on Masonite, 14 x 11 inches.

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Gerit Grimm, Beauty Salon, 2011. Wheel-thrown stoneware, 16 x 40 x 9 inches.

Grimm uses wheel-thrown pots as foundational components: a torso, a billowy skirt, a tree trunk. From there, she shapes and fires clay into figures or groupings of figures. Her large-scale ceramic sculptures and installations are astonishing technical feats, though that’s not the first thing about them you’ll notice. Grimm’s renderings of sometimes puzzling, sometimes poignant characters—a girl on a swing, a woman in mourning, a group of women dancing—are utterly captivating.

Litherland’s world is a two-dimensional one, and her figures are placed in settings that merge the familiar with the dreamy. She works in oil on Masonite or wood, building layer upon thin layer of paint and incorporating intricate detail to achieve an effect that is part storybook, part surreal, part romantic: Two women (or are they one and the same?) read tea leaves in a cup while a goat looks on; mother birds lament a dead fledgling; an upside-down fiddler hovers over a boot engulfed in flame.

Born in the former German Democratic Republic, Grimm began as a commercial potter before coming to the United States to study and work. Since 2012 she has been an assistant professor of ceramics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, teaching graduate-level courses to up-and-coming potters and artists. Litherland is a working artist and lifelong Midwesterner. Born and raised in Gary, Indiana, and schooled (formally and informally) in Chicago, she has for the past 25 years worked out of her home in Cedarburg, north of Milwaukee.

Though the two artists had never met before their side-by-side exhibitions at the James Watrous Gallery, curator and gallery director Jody Clowes saw in their work similar themes that made for a good pairing. For Grimm and Litherland both, fables and fairy tales seem to be a means of connecting with something more real.

The wisdom of nature, the instincts of the ancients, and knowledge handed down through folklore are the artistic wells from which they draw. It’s never easy to make sense of the world we’re in, so why not look to clues from another?

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A CONSUMING ATTRACTION TO CLAY Gerit Grimm isn’t exactly sure why she became attracted to clay at such a young age, but she has a theory: As an anemic child, she developed an innate attraction to the traces of iron found in clay. “I was just fascinated by the smell,” she says, adding with a smile, “I even secretly ate it.”

Grimm grew up in Halle, about 25 miles from Leipzig, in what was then part of Soviet East Germany. “We weren’t introduced to commercial stuff,” she says of those early years when the availability of goods and services was controlled by a socialist government. “We had only so much and basically we read all the same fairy tales, we watched all the same movies.” Aesthetic innovation seemed to begin and end with the Bauhaus Movement, which hoped to merge fine art, craft, and industrial design.

Constriction, however, can encourage imagination. Hobbies and handicrafts were part of daily life, and Grimm’s creative mind looked to clay to fill her time. She took her first ceramics class at age twelve. When a teacher bypassed her and instead chose a boy to train in wheel throwing, Grimm hardened her resolve to one day master the potter’s wheel. She bided her time sculpting, and, after high school, traveled from factory to factory in search of a pottery apprenticeship. In Bürgel, she found someone who told her, “If you can find someplace to live within an hour, you’re hired.” By chance, her waitress at lunch later that day was also a landlord, and the apprenticeship was hers. She spent three years learning to produce traditional Bürgel Blue earthenware pitchers, bowls, and other household pottery.

After her apprenticeship, Grimm became a journeyman potter with Joachim Jung, again making functional stoneware. Both experiences refined her skills at the wheel and taught her to work fast. At first, she had dreams of being “a hard-core functional potter,” living the hippie life in the middle of nowhere and tending a garden when she wasn’t at the wheel. “I don’t think I would have gotten very rich,” she laughs. But she also wasn’t exposed to many alternatives.

@ THE Watrous Gallery

Left: Gerit Grimm, Gardener, 2012.

Stoneware, 39 x 23 x 25 inches.

Below: Gerit Grimm

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Gerit Grimm, Untitled, 2015.

Wheel-thrown stoneware, 22 x 8 x 8 inches.

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After the Cold War ended and Germany was reunified in 1990, capitalism began to open up new possibilities for many citizens. But the pottery scene in Germany was still stuck in a past that Grimm found to be stifling. It wasn’t until she returned home to Halle and enrolled in art school that Grimm would be introduced to Pop and Funk ceramics: colorful, hand-built objects from the West that were playful to the point of oddball, and under no obligation to be functional. Realizing she too could break from the disciplines of her training, Grimm found her new direction—and decided to leave the wheel behind.

A grant to attend the University of Michigan School of Art and Design brought Grimm to the U.S. in 2002, and she continued her study of ceramics at Alfred University, which houses 8,000 ancient and modern ceramic objects in its Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. She returned to the wheel after an instructor informed her that she had two left hands (Grimm’s translation: “It means, basically, ‘I sculpted badly’ ”). But this time, her cylinders became something to be flattened into slabs and cut, glazed, and handled almost like paper. She began creating installations reminiscent of pop-up books.

In the ensuing years, Grimm finished her studies and continued to draw inspiration from folktales and myth. Many of her ceramic figures were two dimensional and sometimes life-sized. She played with the idea of figurines, adding her own twists and teasing out the tensions between pop and high art, elegance and whimsy. Her work remained colorful, and gradually became more sculptural. Pots

@ THE Watrous Gallery

Gina Litherland, Bird Funeral, 2015.

Oil on panel, 16 x 24 inches.

made a return as she realized she could leave them intact and incorporate them into her figures.

One day someone left Grimm a large quantity of brown clay. She decided to give it a try. As she explored ways to use it, she came to love the way the clay’s unglazed finish felt like skin, mimicked the appearance of stone, and revealed the throwing lines from the wheel. When she fired the brown-clay pieces in a reduction atmosphere—a process that restricts oxygen to force different qualities from the clay—serendipitous, subtly metallic shades of browns and brownish green appeared.

Grimm began her Brown Series in 2011, and has worked exclusively in this style since then. With color and shine stripped away, the clay’s texture is revealed and the potter’s hand becomes more evident. Her figures feel less decorative, more real, with imperfections that leave room for intimacy. Grimm points to many modern-era ceramicists who inspire her, particularly those whose work is figurative, but she is also influenced by Renaissance art and Hellenistic sculpture.

Grimm continues to draw on folktales and mythology today in order to create peddlers, harvesters, gardeners, and groupings of figures that call to mind scenes by the Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel. While there is a theatrical, puppet-like quality to these narratives made from clay, they can sometimes hold you in an uncomfortable place between endearment and distress. While her Sunday Morning (2011) features a cheeky girl caught in the act of

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Gina Litherland, The Floppy Boot Stomp (for Don Van Vliet), 2012. Oil on Masonite, 30 x 24 inches.

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@ THE Watrous Gallery

climbing her dresser, the women of Beauty Salon (2011) work with limbs, heads, and braids on a macabre assembly line. Other somewhat grim tableaux feature a beheading by guillotine, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and numerous versions of Leda’s rape by Zeus in the shape of a swan.

AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY Gina Litherland’s voice brightens as she recalls a moment of discovery. She was just a teenager, her older brother was home from art school, and “there was this book laying on his bed. It was Lucy R. Lippard’s Dadas on Art: Tzara, Arp, Duchamp and Others.

I thought, Dada? I was taking art classes but—what was this?” Not every Midwestern girl raised on fairy tales and Catholic-school catechisms would feel so drawn to an avant-garde European art movement. It was an early sign of Litherland’s intellectual curiosity, and a clue to the artist she’d become.

Before she started requisitioning her brother’s art school books, Litherland’s influences were more homegrown. She remembers sobbing over “schmaltzy and lurid” fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. In summer, she roamed the sand dunes and undeveloped lots around her Indiana subdivision, unsupervised and free to imagine. She still cherishes those unstructured moments with nature as precious counterpoints to the indoor strictures of Catholic school. Yet each had its magic—one wild and natural, another ritualistic and supernatural.

Litherland initially studied English Literature in college. But she felt out of place at Indiana University’s large Bloomington campus and dropped out to find a job. She moved to Chicago, fell in with a group of artists, and started to study drawing at an art studio. Litherland eventually earned a BA from the Art Institute of Chicago, but she says most of her education happened outside of formal institutions and inside the city’s blues and jazz clubs, art film houses, and, of course, the Art Institute, with its massive collection of classic and contemporary works from around the world.

Litherland explored photography, drawing, and even performance. But painting became the place where her interests met most happily. “I really hit my stride when I realized I could use the storytelling aspect of painting. That was when I really found my voice.”

After seventeen years in Chicago, Litherland and her husband decided to move into his parents’ house in the Town of Cedarburg.

It was a dramatic urban-to-rural shift, but appropriate. Litherland is deeply moved by the natural world, and draws inspiration from it. Her paintings are chock full of lush vegetation and animals that often interact with human characters and even take on human qualities.

Litherland usually starts with an idea that hits her when reading a book or musing over a topic. For instance, her Don Juan paintings sprang from a period when she and her mother were attending a lot of operas (Mozart’s Don Giovanni is based on the fictional libertine).

She might have a tableau in mind, but the details don’t become clear until she paints. Elements are assembled in ways that can seem random, and might even be conceived from random thoughts. Scaled to be intimate, typically no more than 24 inches across, her paintings draw in the observer through intriguing and mysterious details.

Gina Litherland, The Unknown Room, 2014. Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches.

Gina Litherland

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Left: Gina Litherland, Terre Verte, 2013. Oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches.

Opposite page: Gerit Grimm, Swing Set, 2014.

Ceramic sculpture, 55 x 59 x 9 inches.

“I always like to have a channel open for an unexpected idea. And then I’ll add another dimension to the story line.” In this way, the process of a painting becomes “a process of revelation to me.”

Revelation is what she hopes a viewer will experience, too. You needn’t know anything about the Brontë children when you’re viewing Anne and Emily Brontë Escape from Glass Town (2014), but you can bring your own understanding of why there are clouds inside a house and children at play beneath an oversized table. This holds true whether she’s depicting Seráphine, Lilith, or Little Red Riding Hood. The source might be mythology, a novel, or an obscure folk tale, but Litherland’s artistic interpretation invites us to create our own story.

OLD WORLD ATTRIBUTES Painstaking is a word that comes to mind when viewing the works of both Grimm and Litherland. Not coincidentally, each artist has chosen to incorporate Old World techniques that require hours of labor and concentration.

Litherland uses a multilayered glaze-and-scumble technique in which thin, transparent layers of paint (glazing) combine with dry-brushing over opaque light areas (scumble). Each layer must dry before the other is applied. As such, one painting might take as long as three months to complete.

The luminous glow found in Litherland’s work is reminiscent of works by the 15th century Sienese masters of the glaze-andscumble technique, suggesting a timelessness that both contrasts and complements her subject matter. Much like Litherland does

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today, these narrative-based painters of the early Renaissance often layered symbolic details into their scenes and created stylized figures that fused the mystical with the human.

Since gravity and the kiln can undo a potter’s work at a moment’s notice, risk is part and parcel of Grimm’s chosen medium. Even though she has spent years perfecting her techniques for life-sized figures, she has seen large pieces break apart in the kiln. Grimm once had a rule for herself: If it breaks in the kiln, rebuild it bigger. “It’s good to use that rage and disappointment and energy and just do it again. You have no choice, right? If I make it bigger and again, I’ll actually win.”

These days, Grimm is adjusting to a smaller kiln and assembling large-scale pieces from smaller components. “Now I have to build out more connection systems. So if I want to build a large tree, I have to make multiples and they have to fit together like a lid and jar. I have to be really smart about it.”

Viewing the art of both Grimm and Litherland and learning more about them as artists, it’s clear their work requires trips down the rabbit holes of childhood memory, art history, and classic literature.

If one were to compose a Litherland-Grimm encyclopedia of allusions, it would include Wuthering Heights and Lady Godiva, Goethe and Ulysses, Rimbaud and Commedia dell’Arte, walks in the forest and tango dancing.

“I just find many ideas of the past much more interesting than the commercial world of now,” says Grimm. It’s a deliberate choice of the enduring over the transient, and one that Litherland echoes when she says, “It has always been important to me to create work that presents a deeper vision of what is really valuable in the world.”

@ THE Watrous Gallery

SEE THE EXHIBITION GINA LITHERLAND & GERIT GRIMM APRIL 28 - JUNE 18 Join us for these related events:

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 5:30–7:30 PM, WITH ARTISTS’ TALKS AT 6:30 PM GERIT GRIMM DEMO @ UW-MADISON ART LOFTS THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 6:30–8:00 PM ART@NOON GALLERY TALK FRIDAY, JUNE 16

Thank you to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following exhibition sponsors: Diane M. Bacha is a Milwaukee resident who has worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, and executive, and is now editorial director at Kalmbach Publishing Company in Waukesha. She frequently writes about visual arts as a regular contributor to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Art City pages, and was formerly the assistant managing editor for Entertainment and Features at that newspaper. She was a 2003 Getty/ USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Fellow.

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Fiction

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Fiction

THE REMEDY OF FORTUNE

BY I.S. KALLICK

W

ill often dreamed of falling, but never flying. Sometimes a cable

would slip, or a board would snap, or his foot would step on air to tread on mere surprise. Time and again he failed to wake until his dreaming body slammed into the ethereal street, emptying his lungs.

I.S. Kallick, Hope, from The Remedy of Fortune, after Machaut, 2017.

Acrylic on Masonite with digital overlay, 5 x 7 inches.

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Fiction

Waking in darkness, he gulped the air of his concrete-walled room, damp and thick with mold spores. The cold seeping from the slab through his bedroll numbed his aching back.

Based on his conviction that the best ideas come at the edges of sleep, Will kept his phone nearby, a recording app at the Read award-winning fiction by emerging ready. “The same dream again,” he told his phone. “It isn’t real, and established Wisconsin writers at but the pain is, just like an imaginary garden with real toads. wisconsinacademy.org/fiction Like Marianne Moore said in her poem. I wonder if Boethius whispered the phrase in her ear as she dreamed about holding him close while letting him go. Holding him between philosophy and poetry.”

He sat up, but kept the light off. “And when they wrapped their minds around each other in his dark prison cell, she promised to love him as though he were a woman. She would conceive, carry and bear his words like children.”

Will paused and the app rested. The other electronics in the room hummed in the silence, filling the darkness with a soft b flat. He let his mind drift. Bright phosphenes sparkled and turned in his visual cortex, forming a diagram of a block and tackle, a redesign of his current rig. He calculated the ratio of load to force. Adequate. It would get him on and off high walls quickly, and fit in his backpack. He had all the parts and only needed to assemble them.

“Who needs light to think?” he said. “Ideas glow in the dark.”

The new equipment changed his plans. Instead of pasting another poem on an overpass, he could work at the top of the Mariner’s Bank and Trust, the highest he had ever gone.

Will clicked on the light. With a toss of his sleeping bag, scraps of paper scattered. Drifting poems covered paint cans and brushes, ladders, books, and dusty electronics, filling the corners of the room. He had composed some of the poems. The rest he cut from manuals, love letters, high school anthologies, and junk mail. But the best poems came to him by chance. The Lady Fortune was his muse and mistress, the source of his uncanny luck, so his favorite poems were the ones he cracked out of fortune cookies. Will picked up three of the paper slips, looking for mordant aphorisms, blunt wisdom, latent prophecy.

The first read, Without coincidences, there would be no stories. He put it in his pocket.

The second had a row of lucky numbers, which he briefly considered as subject matter, then disregarded. He read the message below, Each day, compel yourself to do something you would rather not. He let go of the slip and it fell like a cherry petal. “Nope. The Lady Fortune laughs at both free will and obedience. Freedom always submits to fate.”

The third fortune read, We should always have old memories and young hopes. Will smiled and put the paper on the scanner. “That’s the one. First person plural, ambiguous, yet rings true. Profound, yet trite. Speaks to all, but seems personal.”

When the scan was done, he printed it in sections and pasted them into a twelve-by-three foot banner. He rolled the banner into a cardboard tube and set it aside for the second stage of his work.

Within a few hours, Will had built his new block and tackle. He loaded it in his backpack with two of his best six-inch Flagship badger brushes and three cans of paint in double zip-top bags. No spray paint any more. That’s for young people. Just thinking about the vapors made his ears ring.

A

little after two in the morning, Will hoisted his pack and passed through a steel door into the steam tunnels. Every city has something like it: utilities, drains, entombed avenues. Invisible people moved there, sinking below the streets and resurfacing elsewhere.

After six turns and two straightaways, Will stopped, shouldered an iron grate, and crawled up to the street.

The city above was too empty, the open spaces full of amoral intent. The wind off Lake Michigan rose up and tapped a cable against a metal flagpole. A cab flickered by on the next block. As its lights faded, Will threaded through alleys and hugged the margins of parking lots until his intended building came into view. It was slated for demolition. Impermanent.

Mutable.

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Fiction

His message might only last a few weeks, but that was fitting. Fortune’s wheel turned, raising the lowly and bringing down the mighty. Looking up at the abandoned bank’s facade with its shattered windows, he recalled a scrap of verse by Perez:

In the great crash, who leapt?

Who leapt and crashed?

Who leapt and fell?

Who wore stripes to suit the fall fashions of October?

Will squeezed through a gap in the fence, climbed a storage bin, and took a long step to the top of the salvage company trailer. From there he could pull himself onto the remains of the fire escape. He scaled the six stories to the roof, then rested. He dismissed a creaking sound from below. All empty buildings talked at night.

A pipe anchored his safety rope. The jaws of a clamp bit into the soft lead flashing on the edge of the roof, securing his main support. He stepped into the harness and over the side, walking down the building and paying out line until he was about twenty feet down, in the space between two ranks of windows.

Swinging and stepping, Will dipped his brush and drew wide arcs across the limestone.

The silken masonry took half as much paint as brick. Two shades of tan and one black filled out the curves of a giant fortune cookie. He always painted that first, let people wonder, then added the message another night. He enjoyed the risk of returning. A few times, he had to leave in a hurry. But he never got caught.

Just as Will finished, he heard a clang from above. The pulley squealed as the rope slipped, dropping him until he jerked to a stop twenty feet lower. The wall swung close, boxed his ear, tore his jacket. Feet dangling, Will watched his best brush and a bag of tan paint tumble down in separate trajectories. Thirty feet below, the bag burst on the trailer and paint slopped over the side. His brush ricocheted off the pavement and hit the trailer door with a bang.

This was not one of his dreams, however. He was still alive. The safety rope must have held. Hand over hand, he struggled to the top, tightening the ratchet as he went. Fingers curling around the edge of the roof, Will rolled over it and lay on his back. Not yet forty, he felt too old for this. The sky, overcast and grainy, was another slab of pavement. I’m between sky and street, he thought, letting his panicked breath slow until it could sustain speech.

“Between words and acts,” he murmured. Will needed to get up. Climb down. Staggering under the weight of his pack, he rose, and the world tilted. He heard soft chimes, distant temple gongs and realized it was the ring of his feet on the fire escape. A white shape swam into view below. The trailer. He dangled and dropped, slid on paint and hit the roof. The thud resounded. He looked over the edge.

Lady Fortune met his gaze from below. She had brown eyes, radiant and furious. A gun, small caliber. A flashlight. A guard uniform, misbuttoned. Will shook off the mythological haze and saw that he was cornered by private security.

“Come down,” the guard said. “You can use the dumpster.”

Will nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“Be quiet.” She glanced around the empty lot, keeping the beam on Will as he climbed down. “Drop your pack and stand against the wall.”

Slipping it off, Will felt suddenly weightless, as though he were falling again. He stumbled to the wall and said, “I think I’m bleeding.” Light scattered off the gun barrel. He knew he should be afraid, but the thought seemed distant, somewhere in a book, in an ancient language, deep in a library. Alexandria, maybe.

“Hands on the wall.” Will complied and she patted him down, then swept the flashlight beam over his scraped brow, so close it warmed his skin. “It’s not deep,” she said.

The light flooded Will’s eyes and he shut them. “What are you going to do?”

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Fiction

She gestured with the gun. “Get in the trailer. I need to ask some questions.”

Inside, the guard steered him to a shabby blue office chair. She sat opposite, gun lowered but not holstered. “I know you,” she said.

Will shook his head, triggering a wave of dizziness. “Hardly anyone knows me. I’m careful about that.”

“I mean I know your paintings. I’ve seen them around.”

“Oh, those. They’re not paintings. They’re poetry. Visual poetry.”

“What’s the difference?”

Will stared at the gun. Could not find the words.

The guard sat back. “Whatever it’s called, it’s like prophecy to me. When you make the words large and set them apart, they seem more significant, like something that will happen, or something I already experienced.”

As she spoke, Will’s mind drifted. “Past and future,” he muttered.

“Past and future?” She swung the gun from side to side. “You mean like the way they make me think?”

“Are you going to call the cops?” Will flexed his rope-burned palms.

“I haven’t decided.” She gave him a handful of paper towels. “Here. For the blood.”

The abrasion seared as he bunched the coarse paper against his temple. He wanted soap and water. Bandages. His cold, hard bed. Why was she keeping him? “No offense, but do you really need a gun to ask me about my work?”

She shrugged. “If I put it down, you’d run.”

“You have a point.” Nausea welled up, subsided. Will blinked away his confusion and finally knew the guard for who she was. He had to peer back through time to see her: through humid long shadows, the taunts of hungry kids, leaves crumbled by traffic. Past hubcaps melting out of gray ice. Hot tar under his feet. Broken glass. He peered through all this into a blind alley where the girl who never spoke would sit and read. Her name had always been there. “You’re not the Lady Fortune. You’re Bonnie.”

Bonnie put away the gun. “Yes, and you’re Guillame.”

“I go by William now. Will, actually.”

She nodded. “We lived two apartments down.”

“I remember.” He leaned forward, gripped with a sudden clarity. “You know what? I’ve always thought there was something supernatural about the past. Besides what we see in front of us now, everything that came before is just stories. Hearsay. But we believe it.

Memories can seem more real than the present.”

Bonnie smiled a little. “You always talked like that, when you said anything at all.”

“You didn’t say much, either.”

“I prefer reading. That’s why I took this job.” She helped him up. “You can go free on one condition. You have to finish the painting tomorrow night.” They stepped out of the trailer.

Bonnie looked up at the big fortune cookie, still glistening as it dried. “I think my boss won’t give us any trouble. The building’s coming down soon.”

“Not that soon, I think. There’s still a lot of metal to salvage up there.”

She turned away. “A few weeks, then.”

B

ack home, Will cleaned up and treated his wounds. Weariness pressed him down, but when he tried to sleep he kept seeing Bonnie as a young girl on her front steps, reading.

The cover of her book had a picture of a gate in gentle greens and browns. With a jolt of recollection, he flipped the light on and began to search. He found the crumbling old volume between Chaucer’s stories and Machaut’s librettos. Opening to the title page, he bookmarked it with the fortune he had been keeping in his pocket, then stowed it in his bag along with paste, brushes, and black paint. Deep sleep rolled over him the moment he lay down.

When the alarm chimed, he took his pack and the rolled-up print of the fortune to the bank building.

As Bonnie stood guard below, Will could feel her gaze. A few strokes of black gave the illusion that the cookie was broken open. Under the gap, Will unrolled the long paper fortune, pasting it up from one side to the other.

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Fiction

After he climbed down, Bonnie read the saying aloud: “We should always have old memories and young hopes.”

More than ever, Will wanted to believe his own words. He dug in his pack and held out the old poetry book. “I brought you something.

This started it all for me.”

Small fragments of paper fluttered down as she took the book, A Child’s Garden of Verses. She opened it to the title page. This book belongs to Bonnie Doherty. The letter “i” in Bonnie was dotted with a circle. She looked up.

“I kind of borrowed it,” Will said. “Twenty-five years ago. I was too ashamed to give it back.”

“You took it?”

He shrugged. “First and last thing I ever stole. Maybe I was just keeping it for you.”

She closed the book and tried to hold the brittle pages together.

“Read the fortune,” Will said, slipping it out from between the pages and handing it to her.

“Without coincidences, there would be no stories,” she read. “Still the same healthy appetite for meaning, I see. You haven’t changed at all, except for your paintings. They’re better.”

“They’re not paintings, they’re poems that dry on the wall.”

Bonnie smiled. “Are you starting that argument again?”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Will said.

“Remember, I still have a gun.”

They laughed softly as the Garden of Verses shed leaves.

ABO UT TH IS STO RY “The Remedy of Fortune” is dedicated to the memory of John Rininger (1961– 2006), an artist who worked with collage, xerography, and other media, but very little street art. John’s work was often in the form of books or magazines. None of the events in the story are biographical, though they were inspired by my observations of John’s earliest artistic experiments and his use of text.

John died unexpectedly in 2006, without having discovered the limits of his talent. Those of us who knew him mourn his restless intellect and the work he might have done, had he lived longer. A retrospective of his art, called The Heart is Mostly Made of Water, was mounted by Stephen Perkins in 2014 at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay’s Lawton Gallery.

Unlike street artists who use their

I.S. Kallick is a Madison-based artist and writer whose interests include folklore, science, history, and the imagination. Her award-winning illustrations have appeared in such diverse publications as Communication Arts, Cricket, and Scientific American. Kallick’s art exhibitions include Fantastic Worlds at the Kenosha Public Museum (2011); Wild Wood of the Imagination at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison (2012); and Illustration West at the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles (2013, 2015). Her short story, “Sonia,” received the Eleanor Sternig Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers in 2008 and was published that same year in Wisconsin People & Ideas. Her writing has also appeared in Leonardo Magazine, Midwest Review, and other publications.

art to engage in public dialogue about advertising, politics and propaganda, the artist in “The Remedy of Fortune” opts for a more personal discourse with the viewer through language. Sometimes poetry can feel like a connection from mind to mind, more than a public statement. John Rininger’s work had this intensely personal, almost telepathic quality. I tried to capture that in the story.

I.S. Kallick

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Review

The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler Ecco/HarperCollins, 400 pages, $26.99 Reviewed by Jason A. Smith

Novelist Nickolas Butler isn’t afraid to tackle big ideas in his writing. Set in a rural Wisconsin town, his first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, is an exploration of friendship and the ties that bind us to home. Butler’s sophomore effort, set in and around the fictional Camp Chippewa in Northern Wisconsin, seeks to understand the weighty subject of its title: The Hearts of Men. Told in four parts, spanning 1962 to 2019, The Hearts of Men follows two families through three generations. The camp in all its smoky, woodsy glory serves as the crucible through which they all must pass as they struggle to understand their relationships with one another and seek to find meaning in the wake of war and tragedy.

It’s summer of 1962 and the high-achieving but socially awkward Nelson Doughty, antique bugle in hand, prepares for the morning reveille at Camp Chippewa. Scenes from his life unspool as if from an 8mm projector, revealing a young man desperate for not only approval but also guidance. The struggling Nelson finds a kindred spirit in Scoutmaster Wilbur, the old-school-take-no-guff leader of Camp Chippewa who becomes foundational in the formation of the Nelson we return to later in the book.

At Camp Chippewa we’re also introduced to athletic, charismatic Jonathan Quick, a boy who seems to have it all. Where Nelson is frail, the object of taunts and violence because of his perceived weakness—I have to be smarter than them. I can’t fight them all at once, he thinks at one point—Jonathan reveals himself to be weak in another way. In a scene reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Nelson emerges from a perilous predicament with a new understanding of both his own character and Jonathan’s as well.

And this is really what the book is about. While The Hearts of Men might not be a study of manhood on the scale of Robert Bly’s prescriptive Iron John or Hemingway’s powerful yet conflicted The Sun Also Rises, it is a deep dive into the subject of what makes a man, flaws and all. Butler uses Nelson, Quick, and their families to challenge our assumptions about character, forcing the reader to consider what it actually is and, perhaps, how to know if we have it.

Thirty-four years after that formative summer at Camp Chippewa, Jonathan Quick’s teenage son Trevor gets a hard lesson in character from his father and Nelson. Over drinks at the Stardust Supper Club, Trevor meets Deanne, his father’s long-time mistress, and receives from Jonathan a litany of complaint about both his mother and high school sweetheart, Rachel. A confused and repulsed (and slightly drunk) Trevor receives a bit of advice from Nelson as the men head to a strip club. “You might not under-

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stand now, or even in a few years, but … try to give your Dad a break, if you can,” says Nelson. “All you can do is try to be a better man, you know? You take moments like this and you learn from them. You think to yourself, this isn’t the dad I want to be. This isn’t the husband I want to be.”

As the generations move forward we meet an adult Rachel, who went on to marry Trevor, and their teenage son Thomas back at Camp Chippewa where an elderly Nelson is now Scoutmaster Doughty. It’s 2019, and what it means to spend a week in the woods in search of character is called into question in the age of Google and digital devices (not to mention that earning merit badges for tying knots is, like, so uncool). But, when a moment arises for Thomas to make a fateful decision, he finds strength in the “uncool” lessons of his father and Nelson for a scene that brings the novel to a chilling yet hopeful conclusion.

Butler, a former Eagle Scout who lives in rural Fall Creek just outside of Eau Claire, has an excellent feel for the rhythms of camp life and a knack for understanding Northern Wisconsin. Here, as in Shotgun Lovesongs, Butler’s female characters seem overly defined by their interactions with males. But his deftly-drawn Rachel shows a deep consideration of the role mothers have in helping their boys become, as Nelson would say, the men they want to be.

In all, The Hearts of Men is a worthy read and fine examination of the ways in which good character is—or isn’t—learned and passed along between generations, families, friends.

Jason A. Smith is editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas and the former managing editor of The Common Review, the Great Books Foundation’s magazine of books and book culture.

Review

The Transit of Venus

by Susan Firer Backwaters Press, 96 pages, $16.00 Reviewed by Lisa Vihos

My measure of a poem’s quality is often found in the question, “How did the poet think of that?” If that poem should happen to begin an entire collection that has me asking that same question again and again, well, then I know I have something really special in my hands.

This was my experience reading Susan Firer’s new collection, The Transit of Venus.

From the questions the poet raises and answers in the first poem, “Nervous Catechism,” a prelude to the rest of the collection, I knew I was in for a rich journey of surprise and discovery: Q.7 What is the celestial sphere?

“The celestial sphere is an imaginary sphere of gigantic (infinite?) radius of which the observer is the center and on which all celestial objects are considered to lie.” For example, the poem is a celestial sphere.

Right there, Firer had me paying attention. As the collection unfurled, she did not disappoint. Firer writes about transformation, about how something might appear to be one thing and actually turn out to be another. She plays with language in a way that creates its own internal logic, weaving lines together with repetition and the occasional inversion, as in “Dear Dr. Limnologist”: (The dead call the waves comfort.

Call comfort from the waves, the dead.)

Many of the poems in this collection deal with the death of her husband, the poet James Hazard. Firer reminds us how a loved one’s death offers up abandoned clothing, scraps of paper, and memories embedded in the objects left behind. In the title poem, which connects death with the notion of “transit” and the movement of weather, Firer writes: Venus passes between sun & earth. Exceedingly rare, Transit, have you noticed how close the ode & elegy are?

(In the United States someone dies every sixteen seconds!)

Husband, Supermoon, Venus come & go. Death says there is no you at the end of the weather.

Enter The Transit of Venus and let Firer’s poems transport you to things that you know, and introduce you to things you didn’t know you knew. This process of loss and discovery is something that her poems make nearly sacred. From the letter poems like “Dear Hippocampus,” and “Dear Baby Star, Dear Little Astronaut” to the lengthy exploration of Caravaggio (“Brother Michelangelo”), Firer gives us the opportunity to ponder what is left behind when we go.

She is also adept at stretching metaphors until they morph into invention. For example, in the poem “Easting” the poet describes a pier in the water as a concrete trapeze, an altar, race track, chop house, its own joybog, wild-waved lovebed.

Firer is our celestial tour guide and her poems are the vehicles that take us from deep space to the shores of Lake Michigan to the Feast of Sacrifice on the Bosphorus Sea. We can locate ourselves in these poems because she continuously weaves in charmingly specific details, as in “He is Trying to Get Home from the Store”:

Lisa Vihos is a widely published poet with two Pushcart Prize nominations. Vihos is Poetry and Arts Editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and an organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change.

She lives in Sheboygan.

Remember, we drink Serbian Cosmos together, we eat squash blossoms and red snapper soup.

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Review

The Biology of Consciousness

by Thomas J. Erickson Pebblebrook Press, 72 pages, $15.00 Reviewed by Ronnie Hess

Thomas J. Erickson’s first full-length poetry collection, The Biology of Consciousness, stopped me dead in my tracks, even before I cracked the cover. What on earth could the book or its title poem mean?

Various sources tell me this: while not understood, the biology of consciousness is a hot research subject and many new technologies are making it possible to more closely study the brain. Visual fields of reference may trigger electrical gamma waves that allow conscious—and perhaps unconscious—perception. Neurons, the brain’s electric energy-charging cells, may group together to form thoughts.

Of course, philosophers have been arguing about the relationship between mind and body for centuries. So, what’s all of this got to do with poetry? A clue can be found in Erickson’s title poem, “I have not been in this house / before but to enter is to remember / how the capillaries connect / the dream from room to room.” Perhaps for Erickson, words can become neurons, and poetry the expression of consciousness.

His division of the collection into three parts with differing themes reflects similar divisions of the human brain: the cerebrum is the center of perception, emotion, and memory; the cerebellum coordinates everyday tasks; the brain stem commands autonomous functions such as breathing and heart rate.

In the first section, Erickson explores personal history. Early impressions—trout fishing with a grandfather, bird watching on a field trip in third grade, his time as an altar boy—become sometimes tender, sometimes edgy memories.

In the second section, the strongest to my mind, he tosses his readers into a youthful, even dissolute, world of bar life and drinking, as well as Milwaukee’s dark side of violence and racial division.

Erickson, a Milwaukee-based lawyer, shares his workload with us, including cases that can drain the soul. In “Sweating the Bottle,” he writes, “While we waited for the verdict, my client told / me he had molested the boys for years.” In “Phone,” he describes how everyday messages can be both sublime and grotesque, pedestrian and terrible, as in, “I read on my phone the court petition stating my teenaged client helped Smokey move the dead girl from the bathtub to the crawlspace and the Brewers are losing to the Cards 3 to 1 in the fifth.” It’s impossible not to come away from these poems shaken.

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In the third section, life and death questions are again considered, and memory, too. But his themes seem to be more global: the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, the Boston Marathon bombing, ISIS. In “The Tree,” a worker cuts down a blighted chestnut tree in front of Anne Frank’s house but “he may not even notice the attic window.”

What is there to make us conscious of who we are now, and what is there to console us? Is it ultimately the land, the subject of several poems toward the end of the book, a place where “souls still abide in the arctic / fox, the tern, and the snow”? Could it be poetry? Perhaps not. Erickson writes in “February 14, 2015”: Soon enough the roses will arrive and what will be said will be said.

The champagne will pop and this poem will be read and it will be here for all of a day smiled over and then thrown away.

Not so fast, I’d say. If Erickson’s poems aren’t meant to be uplifting, they are fierce and challenging as well as compassionate and graceful. Mercifully, they can also be ironic, even funny. Don’t miss this outstanding collection, to be read over and over again.

Ronnie Hess is a journalist and poet who began her broadcasting career at Wisconsin Public Radio. Hess is the author of three poetry chapbooks and two culinary travel guides, and she blogs regularly for MyFrenchLife.org. She lives in Madison.

Don’t know what to read? Check out reviews of new and interesting books by Wisconsin authors at wisconsinacademy.org/reviews

Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry

Brushing my daughter’s hair The eavesdropped offerings of penguins in their archipelago The summer we pestered the oil rig off the bayou The complimentary Coca Cola After the breast cancer run up the mountain.

That night we met Sir John Falstaff Along the Wisconsin River Under the oak and aspen induced stars: “I have a kind of alacrity in sinking,” He said. Oh, the father-daughter golf tournaments We could have won and should have won The seven baby koi we buried In the empty lot behind the garden.

My daughter doesn’t believe in pine cones.

And that hurts, makes me bite my bottom lip But I endure and awaken and here I am, detangling the light from the dark, Twirling the sheened dangles between my thumb And forefinger. Deeper and deeper and deeper We go. This place, this still point, this solace, This river where I return to spawn to die to rise again.

Todd Temkin, Valparaíso, Chile

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Poetry

Moments in Greece the laser brush we watched burn soot off the gown of an ancient kore the Delphic light, sifted through the nets of the gods to fall on us the molten remains, dark and bitter, at the bottom of each morning’s tiny cup how, beside the piled fallen stones of my grandfather’s home in the mountain village, my daughter and I kneeled on the grass, reaching for one from the rubble, something of him to carry home.

Andrea Potos, Madison

Read award-winning poems by emerging and established Wisconsins poets at wisconsinacademy.org/poetry

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Poetry

What Happens Asking people What happens to them

after they die Is like asking babies in the womb What happens to them

After they’re born— How can they answer When they don’t even know

how to speak yet, When they don’t even know Their mother tongue

So they can understand the question

to begin with Or anything About the outside world?

Ask a sperm cell What happens to it

after it fertilizes

an ovum.

Ask the umbilical cord What happens to it

after it becomes a bellybutton.

Ask a baby in the womb What religion it is

or if its mother believes in immortality.

Ask an unborn baby in its mother Who is making love with its father

what’s happening.

Ask an unborn baby Entering the birth canal

Just about to be born

if there’s life after birth.

Antler, Milwaukee First published in Touch Each Other (2015)

SPRING 2017

55

Poetry

Tobacco and Salt When woman becomes another word for property, for object, she learns to spit fire.

Learns to swallow gasoline.

Replace her sugar with her salt, and shame men who call her “honey” call her “sweetie” call her “sugar” call her “darling.”

She learns to chew her anger like tobacco and spit out words like toxic juice.

If she swallows their poison her body rejects it.

It oozes from her lungs in rivers of rejection, and it sets her heart ablaze.

Her body learns to secrete the venom through the pores of her skin.

She learns to reject labels and refuses to be seen as second best.

When woman becomes another word for his, and pet, and invitations that request her smile, she learns to smolder like tobacco, and it burns like hell.

Sunmi Famule, Superior Wisconsin Poetry Out Loud 2017 recitation contest winner

56

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

What if

television opened a window to bigger worlds?

Wisconsin Public Television

wpt.org

Watch online anytime.

1922 university avenue | madison WI 53726

SPRING 2017

Nonprofit Org. U.S. POSTAGE PAID MADISON, WI Permit No. 1564

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

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

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A Wisconsin brimming with the arts and a lively creative culture

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

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