Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2022

A Scientist’s Artist: Una historia una veritas

Authentic Superior • Agroforestry • Booyah

Sanditon

Finding Your Roots

Around the World in 80 Days

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Christopher Chambers • Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas and Courses Coordinator Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Lizzie Condon • Director, Environmental Initiatives Mohammed El Hannaty • Business Manager Jessica James • Program Coordinator, Climate Initiatives Joe Lyons • Coordinator, Donor Relations Erika Monroe-Kane • Executive Director Matt Rezin • Building Manager and Outreach Coordinator Sallie Anna Steiner • Events and Communications Manager Nikita Werner • Operations Manager OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tom Luljak • President Chan Stroman • President-elect Patricia Brady • Immediate-Past President Richard Donkle • Treasurer Vacant • Secretary Roberta Filicky-Peneski • Vice President for Arts Steven A. Ackerman • Vice President for Sciences L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President for Letters Andrew Richards • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Kimberly M. Blaeser, Burlington Frank D. Byrne, Monona Joseph Heim, La Crosse B.J. Hollars, Eau Claire Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Kevin Reilly, Verona Rafael Salas, Ripon Tim Size, Madison Thomas W. Still, Madison OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) • Foundation Founder Andrew Richards • Foundation President Kristen E. Carreira • Foundation Vice President Richard Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark J. Bradley Patricia Brady Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak Chan Stroman Steve Wildeck

Editor’s Note

Laura Camille Tuley

WISCONSIN ACADEMY

OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

I’ve been thinking about spring lately like most of us, I imagine, in anticipation of sunshine, longer warmer days, and rebirth. I’ve been thinking too about war, and the damage it does to individuals and to us collectively. And I’ve been thinking about the power of stories as a source of resistance and hope. I recently had the opportunity to talk on the air with my friend, Melvin Hinton, who hosts a weekly program on WORT, a local community radio station.

I’ve been joining Melvin on the air occasionally over the past several years and enjoy the free-wheeling, ongoing conversations that usually begin with poetry but often digress in interesting ways. On this episode, only days into the invasion of Ukraine, I thought it might be appropriate to share something by a Ukranian poet. I found a poem by Kateryna Babkina, a writer in Kyiv, to share on the air with Melvin. In it, one of a few of her poems that have been translated into English, she writes: And the earth, as though blood, thick and brown, is warm to the touch.

Here even missing obscurities become truly a fog, With a healing haze they settle on the curves and crevices Of wounded fields, exhausted, frozen in slumber.

Here life has been enchanted, and life, surprisingly, nests in homes with children’s laughter, like foxes in dens, With early cherry blossoms it covers gardens where missiles have twisted the roots, With little bluish clouds in the cold air, it marks human breath.

In an interview in The Odessa Review, Babkina describes readers as “people who are open to different perceptions of the world and want to open their own perception even more,” a description that I believe fits our members and readers of this magazine. It is my hope that the stories we tell, the people we celebrate, and the ideas we explore in these pages four times a year, are ones that expand our perceptions of ourselves, our state, and our world. The work we do at the Academy and in the pages of this magazine is a labor of love for Wisconsin, its people, and its ongoing tradition of innovation and progress in the sciences, arts, and letters.

As we celebrate the return of spring, let us appreciate the laughter of children, the blossoms that appear anew each year, the stories that we write and read and tell each other about our lives. In the face of ongoing threats to the enchantment of everyday life, let us remember the power in community and in nature. Let’s look for ways to come together, get outside, open to new and different perceptions, and enjoy this season of renewal together.

On the cover: Matthew Warren Lee in his Milwaukee studio.

Photo by Howard Leu.

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CONTENTS 01 Editor’s Note 04 From the Director 05 Letters 06 Happenings Wisconsin Table

10 Booyah: A Noun, A Verb, An Exclamation!

John McCracken

Profile

16 Matthew Warren Lee: A Scientist’s Artist Thomas D. Carr

24

Lisa Asp

Essay

Erin Hutchinson and Niko.

24 Authentic Superior: Branching Out on the South Shore Hope McLeod

34 @Watrous Gallery

Georg Eiermann

36

Young chestnut tree.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

VOLUME 68 · NUMBER 2 SPRING • 2022

Wisconsin People & Ideas is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

16

Matthew Warren Lee, The Tainted Sample, 2013. Oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches.

Essay

36 Agroforestry as a Natural Climate Solution Renee Gasch

Fiction

42 Protocol of Print • 3rd-Place Contest Winner Yvette Viets Flaten

Poetry

48 Poems • 2022 Contest Honorable Mentions

Dominic W. Holt, Kathryn Gahl, John Pidgeon, John Freiburger

Book Reviews

52 Waterbaby by Nikki Wallschlaeger Reviewed by Wendy Vardaman

53 Jordemoder by Ingrid Andersson Reviewed by Catherine Young

54 Waiting for the Fall by Rose Ann Findlen Reviewed by Nancy Jesse

55 Geosmin by Catherine Young

Since 1954, the Wisconsin Academy has published a magazine for people who are curious about our world and proud of Wisconsin ideas. Wisconsin People & Ideas features thoughtful stories about our people and culture, original creative writing and artwork, and informative articles about Wisconsin innovation. The magazine also hosts annual fiction and poetry contests that provide opportunity and encouragement for Wisconsin writers.

Copyright © 2022 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS editor JEAN LANG copy editor CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader JODY CLOWES arts editor HUSTON DESIGN design & layout ISSN 1558-9633

Reviewed by Robin Chapman

56 Climate & Energy Spotlight Ashley Vedvig

facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/WatrousGallery

Ideas that move the world forward Join the Wisconsin Academy and help us create a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin people and ideas.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

Wisconsin Academy Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-733-6633 • wisconsinacademy.org

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Sharon Vanorny

From the Director

I step enthusiastically into the Academy Executive Director role at a time of guarded optimism and cautious dreaming. As the latest COVID wave fades, and some of the insecurity along with it, we welcome a new season and think about what may be ahead. During the pandemic the Academy has continued to create connections to dynamic thinkers, writers, and artists in our state. We are asking ourselves, what is next?

At the Academy, we have a special role to explore and navigate the issues of our time through the powerful lenses of the sciences, arts, and letters. I am excited to join this esteemed organization at such an opportune time. Over the course of my career, I have led teams in private, public, and nonprofit organizations, including ones like the Academy with a Wisconsin-wide focus. Community engagement and dynamic partnerships are hallmarks of my work. In this time of awakening and re-emerging, I am making plans for traveling and exploring Wisconsin, forging and reviving relationships. This emergence aligns with the ease and delight of spring, and it also reflects my priority on understanding how the Academy can continue to provide relevant experiences and meaningful connections to the people of Wisconsin.

From wintry sojourns on icy lakes to waterways busy with baby ducks and boaters, the beauty of Wisconsin draws many of us outside. We know this natural world is more than our retreat—it is our responsibility. While climate change feels overwhelming to

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combat, dialogue convened by the Academy has established clear next steps to fight back right here at home. The Academy Climate Team has been working with seasoned professionals, new voices, and diverse audiences across Wisconsin on the upcoming Climate Fast Forward conference. Engaging the people who are and will be most impacted by the effects of climate change in our state, the conference is a one-of-a-kind forum for identifying and putting into practice concrete measures to restrain the havoc of climate change.

Creating opportunities for us to learn from one another is at the heart of the Academy. As we consider what is next, we are exploring the timely and timeless questions of identity: Who am I? and Who are we? The urgency around these issues has increased, and we challenge ourselves to admit and correct bias. This exploration has the power to illuminate truth, to heal, and to drive needed change.

Whether through learning about violence of the past or confronting the Academy’s own blind spots, we are called to confront what is difficult, to do better, and to learn from each other. Thank you for joining the Academy on this journey. I’m happy to be here with you.

News for Members JAMES WATROUS GALLERY Announcing three concurrent solo exhibitions at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, April 15 to June 12, 2022: New Domesticity, an exhibition by photographer Lois Bielefeld; Bodies of Knowledge, an exhibition by painter Comfort Wasikhongo; and Kinfabula, a flamboyant, siteresponsive installation by social artist Borealis. wisconsinacademy.org/gallery CLIMATE & ENERGY CONFERENCE Climate Fast Forward 2022, our Climate & Energy Conference on October 17, 2022, is an opportunity for all of us to take stock of the progress Wisconsin has made towards mitigating and adapting to climate change since the 2019 conference, and to confront the challenges we still face. Save the date, and watch the website for registration details. To become a conference sponsor: environment@wisconsinacademy.org ACADEMY COURSES Our Spring Courses are underway! Academy Courses provide opportunities in creative writing and the visual arts. Watch our website for summer and fall courses. Academy members receive a 10% discount on course fees. wisconsinacademy.org/ courses 2022 FICTION AND POETRY CONTESTS Thank you to all the Wisconsin writers who entered their work in the 2022 Fiction and Poetry Contests. As we go to press, entries are being read and finalists selected for our judges. Winners will be announced this summer, and will begin appearing in the fall issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas.

FULL CIRCLE LEGACY PROGRAM Consider adding the Wisconsin Academy to your estate plans. Leaving a legacy benefits future generations. Legacy gifts provide a foundation for building a better world inspired by Wisconsin ideas. wisconsinacademy.org/legacy.

Letters I was inspired by the scholars, caregivers, and artists featured in your winter issue. Your examples of young, middle-age, and older adults creating a real and lasting impact on their communities…impresssive!

As a result of your work, I followed Geologist Rudy Molinek on Apple Podcasts, subscribing, listening, and learning from “Under Our Feet”; I contacted artist Jaden Flores on Instagram (AKA JayFlo99) about a contract to create a mural on the perfect garage site (a spot along the Eau Claire bike trail, overlooking Skate Park); and addressed “the dragon in the room,” with my husband, prompted by your end-of-life doula article. Thank you, Christopher Chambers, for your fine work creating stories for everyone, and good luck, Erika Monroe-Kane, on your new adventure.

Erica Kauten, Madison

You hit a home run with Volume 68, Issue 1. Maybe two homers because of my love of two stories in the magazine.

1. “ A Story Written in Ice.” My academic career began in 1967 as a UW–Milwaukee Teaching Assistant for a course called Physical Geography of Wisconsin that featured an all-day student trip to look at glacial features. This followed with another three years of lectures, labs, and field trips relating to Geomorphology at the UW–Marinette Center Campus. Do I love reading about the products of continental glaciers? Absolutely.

2. “ Landjaeger.” As a kid spending summers on Lake Beulah, I greatly relished the landjaeger my mother brought to our cottage from a country meat market near East Troy. Mom went out of her way to keep me supplied with this meaty treat. Did I learn something about the origin and making of landjaeger?

Absolutely.

Keep up this great work. The rest of the magazine content also was fun to read through.

Don Last, Madison

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR We want to hear from you. Send feedback and comments about the magazine and other Academy programs to cchambers@ wisconsinacademy.org

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HAPPENINGS

Lori Giebel

AFGHAN REFUGEE IMMERSION A group of UW–Eau Claire students and faculty spent two weeks in January living among the thousands of Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy in Monroe County. Resettlement agencies are working to secure housing and other services for these men, women, and children in communities throughout the country. The participants in “Understanding the Refugee Experience in Western Wisconsin” were prepared to hear stories of trauma and loss during the two-week immersion program. What they weren’t prepared for was the laughter, joy, kindness, resilience, and generosity they found interacting with the refugees each day. The 26 students in the program lived on the base the first week and in nearby hotels the second week. Each day they were assigned to different centers where Afghan refugees gathered to sew, draw, play soccer and other games, or simply share stories.

The program was developed by faculty and staff at the suggestion of John Rosenow, a Buffalo County dairy farmer and longtime university partner, according to Jeff DeGrave, coordinator of UW–Eau Claire’s Intercultural Immersions program. “Most of John’s dairy workers are migrant laborers from Latin America,” DeGrave says, noting his investment in them as people and not just as laborers. Rosenow saw a similar opportunity to support Afghan refugees. The university’s Council on Internationalization and Global Engagement and the Intercultural Immersions Office coordinated with Catholic Charities and Fort McCoy to build the program. Besides supporting the refugees and helping them adjust to American culture, one of the program’s goals is to help students better understand the effects—intended and unintended—that governmental policies have on people.

Kranti Dugar

Judith Berthiaume

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

AWARDS FOR MURAL The Sanctuary mural, created by Sylvia Annelise Hecht as part of The Oxbow Hotel’s Artist-in-Residence Program, has been receiving awards since its completion in October 2021. The outdoor mural, painted on the side of The Fire House tavern on the corner of Gibson Street and Graham Avenue in Eau Claire, took Hecht and a team of volunteers three weeks to complete. Since then, the Sanctuary mural has been voted Best New Mural in the 2022 Best of the Chippewa Valley issue of Volume One, and has received an award from the Downtown Eau Claire organization for the “Most Impressive Glow-Up.” Hecht, a multidisciplinary visual artist from Osceola, was the artist-in-residence at the Oxbow Hotel in 2021. Her work is inspired by her travels and illustrates the complex harmony between humanity and the natural world, the only known sanctuary in the universe for life as we know it. In addition to the Sanctuary mural, she has created large-scale murals and led visual design projects in seven countries around the world.

Art is an integral element of the Oxbow Hotel, which features original work from both literary and visual local artists in its gallery, guest rooms, corridors, and exterior walls. As part of its mission to bring more art into the community for residents and guests, the hotel established the Artist-in-Residence Program in 2018. By all accounts, the Sanctuary mural project achieved the program’s goal, to foster visual art and community partnerships while enhancing the downtown Eau Claire area.

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Louis Hansel

HAPPENINGS

A M E R I C A’S B L A C K H O L O C A U ST M U S E U M

C O F F E E W ITH A C A U S E

After closing over a decade ago, America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) reopened February 25, on what would have been the 108th birthday of its founder, Dr. James Cameron. In the heart of the Bronzeville neighborhood in Milwaukee, ABHM is dedicated to documenting the history of violence against African Americans. The museum was founded in 1984 by Cameron, a civil rights pioneer who was inspired to create ABHM after visiting a holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Dr. Cameron, who survived a lynching in 1930 when he was 16 years old, moved in the 1950s to Milwaukee where he was a key figure in the civil rights movement.

He published many articles and booklets detailing civil rights issues and occurrences of racial injustice, as well as a memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. He died in 2006, and the museum closed two years later amidst the recession.

A group of dedicated museum patrons worked to continue his legacy, and the museum moved online in 2015. While the virtual museum continues to serve millions of visitors in over 200 countries each year, there is once again a physical space where the museum keeps Black history in America alive in the world’s conscience to fulfill its vision of “a better future—a nation undivided by race where every person matters equally.”

The building at the corner of Vel R. Phillips and North Avenue includes the museum and the historic Garfield School, which was renovated into affordable apartments.

The physical space for the museum is called “The Griot,” a Western African word for “storyteller.” The exhibits are organized according to four themes: Remembrance, Resistance, Redemption, Reconciliation. Besides helping to build awareness of the harmful legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws in America, the museum also strives to promote repair, reconciliation, and healing among races. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday.

Opening a café where people with special needs can gain valuable work experience was Mackenzie Edinger’s dream throughout college, but the reality always felt decades away. When the perfect spot in Hartland’s Village Square went up for sale, she saw an opportunity to expand employment opportunities to the disabled community.

In starting Inclusion Coffee Company, she has combined her past restaurant experience with her education and her experience working with special needs individuals. Edinger has worked as a job coach and as a volunteer with Best Buddies, a nonprofit dedicated to integrated employment, leadership development, and inclusive living for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The Inclusion Coffee Company, scheduled to open in late March, aims to provide its special needs employees with valuable experience in cooking, baking, crafting drinks, handling money, and customer service. The new café’s goal is to have more than half of its staff positions filled by special needs workers. The shop will serve coffee from Berres Brothers Coffee Roasters, a veteran-owned small business in Watertown, as well as juices, smoothies, baked goods, breakfast dishes, and sandwiches.

Edinger received her undergraduate degree in Early Childhood and Special Education from UW–Whitewater and is working towards a Masters degree in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW–Madison. Her first employee is Jack Ryan, who lives with Down syndrome and was previously under her care. They are excited to work together to create a new, welcoming environment in Waukesha County’s Lake Country.

Alex Paniagua

Jack Ryan

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Mackenzie Edinger

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Wisconsin Table

Dan Nitka, owner of The Booyah Shed in Green Bay.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Wisconsin Table

BOOYAH

A Noun, A Verb, An Exclamation!

BY J O H N McCRACKEN

I

t’s a noun, a verb, an exclamation, and a hot bowl of everything but the kitchen sink. Booyah, a regional

soup, holds a firm grip over the people of Green Bay and northeast Wisconsin at large. Residents take pride in preparing large batches of booyah (the soup) for a booyah (a gathering), whether at a park, church

All photos by John McCracken

basement, or parking lot, so all can enjoy this hearty dish.

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Wisconsin Table

A batch of booyah in a cast iron kettle at the Booyah Shed.

Booyah is akin to Door County fish boils and other similar dishes served at community get-togethers in other parts of the country, such as jambalaya and crawfish boils in Louisiana.

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Booyah has a mysterious and disputed history. A 2015 article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette attempted to chronicle its origins with interviews of local residents, some who claimed that their great-grandfather invented the dish, and one who took credit for the soup’s odd name.

The engaged, and often heated, discussions that ensue when locals talk about the dish is a sign of a healthy and active food culture according to Terese Allen, author of numerous Wisconsin cookbooks, and co-author of the comprehensive Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State. She has written about Wisconsin’s food and culinary history for decades and is the co-founder of Culinary History Enthusiasts of Wisconsin (CHEW).

“You go to a booyah to eat booyah,” says Allen. “That’s saying something about the importance or the connection people have to it because it becomes larger than the dish itself. It's the event as well.”

At its most basic, booyah is a soup created in large batches to serve large groups of people. The dish often features fresh vegetables, like carrots, green beans, peas, potatoes, and celery, and one main protein, with chicken the most common in the Green Bay area.

There are conflicting opinions over whether booyah should include cabbage, rice, additional meats, or tomatoes.

“There is no one recipe,” says Allen. “It's much like chili in that people have strong opinions and strong feelings about the right way to do it.” Allen says booyah is specific to the lower-Door County, Green Bay, Brown County, and Outagamie County region, and not everyone in the state knows about it. Traveling around Wisconsin to give presentations, she has noted that people in the lower, central, and western parts of the state seem perplexed when she mentions booyah. She believes the Belgian-American heritage in the eastern region of the state is at least partly responsible for the booyah tradition there.

Immigrants from Belgium flocked into Wisconsin in the second half of the 19th century. A report by the Ministère de la Région Wallonne in Brussels, Belgium, on file at the UW–Green Bay library, documents the immigration from 1854 to 1855 of more than 15,000 Belgians to the lower-Door County region, including Door, Kewaunee and Brown Counties.

While there isn’t a dish in Belgium called booyah, Allen says it's likely that Belgian immigrants created it using inexpensive, in-season ingredients to cook meals for large group gatherings.

According to the Belgian Heritage Center in Brussels, Wisconsin, Belgian-American communities celebrate an annual harvest tradition called Kermiss or Kermis, with games, singing, outdoor activities, and booyah in a three-day festival. The festival was also a way for the 19th-century immigrants to raise money for their rural schools, churches, and communities, a practice still seen today in local fundraisers around the region each fall.

Chicken booyah particularly can be found in a variety of places across Green Bay, from Menard’s parking lots to Lutheran church basements, and it has found its way into the contemporary culture of the region. The local collegiate summer baseball team, the Green Bay Rockers, was known as the Green Bay Booyah from 2019 to 2021. During those years, the ballpark served chicken booyah during games from a 2,000 gallon booyah kettle claimed to be the world’s largest. The team’s mascot was Rocky Bal-Booyah, a larger-than-life cartoon chicken.

Wisconsin Table

Stove-Top Chicken Booyah Feeds 10 or more

Al Klimek, a retired Green Bay firefighter, paramedic, and Chief Medical Examiner, prepares his 16-gallon booyah recipe for family reunions, Packer tailgate parties, and other outdoor events. This is a 3-gallon version of the recipe that can be cooked indoors on the stove. Klimek notes that the canned peas, corn, and green beans called for here may be replaced with frozen. No need to thaw them before adding them to the pot. This recipe was originally published in The Allen Family Reunion Cookbook, ed. Terese Allen (2019).

INGREDIENTS

DIRECTIONS

1 1 lb.

1 1 1 lb. ½ 1½ lbs.

7 am Place whole stewing chicken in a 3-gallon kettle; fill kettle with water until chicken is slightly submerged. Bring to a slow boil. Cut onions, cabbage, rutabaga, carrots, and celery into small bite-size pieces, and keep them in separate piles or bowls.

2 Tbsp.

1 Tbsp.

1 can 1½ lbs.

1 can 1 can 1 can

6 to 7 lb. stewing chicken onions small head cabbage small rutabaga carrots bunch celery beef stew meat, in bite-sized pieces ¼ of a 12-oz. jar of granulated chicken soup base Lawry’s Seasoning Salt black pepper (14 oz.) regular stewed tomatoes potatoes (15 oz.) corn (15 oz.) peas (15 oz.) green beans

8 am Add beef, half the onions, half the cabbage, soup base, Lawry’s Seasoning Salt, black pepper and stewed tomatoes to kettle. Continue with slow boil for 1 to 1½ hours, until chicken is fully cooked. Remove the whole chicken from kettle and let it cool.

9:30 am Add the other half of the onions and the cabbage, and all the rutabaga, carrots, and celery to kettle. Continue with slow boil. Bone the cooled chicken and cut meat into spoon-size pieces. Peel and cut potatoes into pieces slightly larger than the other vegetables.

10:30 am Add all the potatoes, corn, peas, beans, and boned chicken meat to kettle and slow boil for 1 hour, until potatoes are cooked. Reduce heat to low and keep warm.

(Don’t continue boiling it).

11:30 am Ready to eat!

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Wisconsin Table

While the dish may not exist in other parts of the state, Allen says it shows up in similar forms in communities like St. Paul, Minnesota, where chicken booyah is served at church suppers.

Communities along Lake Michigan’s northern shore have fish booyahs that are similar to chicken booyah in structure and communal importance. Their booyah is akin to Door County fish boils and similar dishes served at community events in other parts of the country, such as jambalaya and crawfish boils in Louisiana.

Allen, who now lives in Madison, grew up in Green Bay and has a strong, familial connection to the dish. Her father, a man with Belgian roots and customs, grew up eating fish and turtle booyahs, and she did as well until chicken booyah became the dominant version in the Northeast region. She shared the story of how her father ate the dish on the last day of his life.

“Booyah was Dad’s favorite food…it was a Belgian food (and) that was a meaningful thing for him,” says Allen. “That he got to eat it on his last day has become part of the folklore of our family.”

F

or Dan Nitka, booyah and family have been interwoven for the last two decades. Nitka and his brother Robert began tinkering with a family booyah recipe that originated with their uncle. The brothers began making their booyah to sell at the Green Bay farmers’ market and to serve at church picnics and community events.

For almost four years, Nitka has owned and operated the Booyah Shed on Highway 32, about a mile from Lambeau Field. The modest restaurant is easily missed. Nitka says the building and the name were inspired by the tin-roofed sheds often found in backyards where families and congregations cook their booyah.

“We try to keep it simple, try to keep it old school as much as we can,” says Nitka.

The roughly 1,000-square-foot building has a simple, no-frills feel, but Nitka’s approach to booyah is anything but. He wouldn’t divulge much about their decades-old recipe for booyah, but he says it takes a lot of time.

“We do a few other steps in the process to extract as much flavor from the chicken as possible,” says Nitka. “I’ll say that much.”

Rather than using pre-cut chicken thighs or chicken bouillon, Nitka will cook down 30 pounds of whole chicken low and slow overnight. He divulged that he does include beef bones in the broth and as a result, bone marrow shines in the flavor. He says after refining the recipe for over 20 years, he has come to the point where he considers it perfect.

‘Right now there’s nothing more I would tweak on the recipe,” says Nitka. “We’ve got it dialed in now.”

In addition to whole chickens, Nitka includes fresh vegetables like cabbage and carrots. And the Booyah Shed shows its Green Bay Packers pride with the addition of green and wax (gold) beans.

“People want to booyah for their tailgate parties or parties for the game,” says Nitka. “So once the Packers lost (this year) we kind of did see a little down drop.”

In the summer and fall, the Booyah Shed caters to family gatherings, anniversaries, and Packers parties. In the winter and spring months, customers pile inside to warm up and eat or to pick up quarts of booyah to take home to share with loved ones.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

In 2021, Nitka sold roughly 3,000 galloons of booyah in addition to brats, burgers, tacos, cheese curds, and chicken sandwiches. The booyah is made in a 45-gallon, cast-iron kettle, something Nitka says is crucial to the success of the booyah. They go through about five batches a week. In the summer, the Booyah Shed fires up an old-fashioned 90-gallon kettle outdoors for larger booyahs.

Regardless of the time of year or size of the kettle, Nitka keeps the focus on the customers. The Booyah Shed’s walls are lined with family photos, candid shots of diners, newspaper and magazine clippings of the Booyah Shed’s history, and memorials for people, such as Dan’s brother Bob, who have passed on.

Nitka isn’t a booyah snob. The dish, and his restaurant, are all about the people who make and eat the hearty offering. “Everybody makes it different,” he says. “There’s no right or wrong way.” Like Allen, he’s seen various renditions across the region and in other parts of the country, such as a turkey booya (without the “h”) in northwest Minnesota. No matter how or where you make it, booyah is a year-round dish that brings people together.

John McCracken is a Green Bay journalist who covers environmental concerns, business development, community issues, music, art, and Midwest culture. His work has appeared in The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Great Lakes Now - Detroit Public Television, UpNorthNews, Bandcamp Daily, Loudwire, In These Times, The Capital Times, The Press Times, Tone Madison, Belt Magazine, Green Bay City Pages, Milwaukee Record, and more. He writes a Green Bay news and culture newsletter called The NEWcomer.

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Matthew Warren Lee, Una Historia Una Veritas, 2018. Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches.

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MATTHEW WARREN LEE A SCIENTIST’S ARTIST

BY TH O MAS D. CARR

T

he relationship between science and society is an important one and arguably

a measure of the intellectual and aspirational health of our civilization. One way to keep this relationship strong is to encourage the participation of artists in the scientific enterprise. Carthage College’s Institute of Paleontology in Kenosha does just that, providing an opportunity for artists, from visual to literary, to join its annual field school expeditions to collect, prepare, and conserve fossils. The participation of artists in this work has had profound effects for all involved, as they explore questions of science and experiment with interpretations and ways of communicating the experience.

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As a vertebrate paleontologist, I study the growth and evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives and direct the Institute of Paleontology at Carthage College which trains undergraduate students in the science’s skills of research, fieldwork, and laboratory work. The program is supported by the College and by the City of Kenosha, which houses the College’s fossil preparation laboratory in the city’s Dinosaur Discovery Museum. The dinosaur fossils collected during the field season are stored there and are displayed in the museum’s public exhibits. Students and volunteer citizen-scientists, including artists, help us collect fossils each summer in southeastern Montana.

One of these artists, Matthew Warren Lee, is an American landscape painter from Milwaukee who works primarily in oils.

He earned degrees in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is currently a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). One thing that sets Matthew’s artistic work apart is that his subject matter is drawn from first-hand experiences as a participant-observer of field-based science. Matthew has worked as staff at a research facility in icy, hostile, and awe-inspiring Antarctica and as a citizen-scientist in dusty southeastern Montana.

While employed by a subsidiary of Raytheon, Matthew had two deployments in Antarctica. The first was in 2008, when he spent six months on the coast of the Transantarctic mountains as a member of the housekeeping staff at McMurdo Station.

Following a six-month break, Matthew began a second deployment as a porter at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where projects include the Ice Cube program to find neutrinos in the 9,000-foot thick ice sheet. During the continuous night of Antarctic winter, Matthew was the sole janitor in the station, which was the only shelter from the profound outside chill of -103 F. While at the South Pole Station, he visited the Geographic South Pole and witnessed the Aurora Australis overhead, which inspired several of his paintings.

Along with the crushing depths of oceanic trenches and the frigid, oxygen-deprived summits of the tallest mountains, Antarctica is the harshest environment on the planet. Matthew spent 371 days there, and his experiences are beautifully expressed in his paintings, which depict the starkness of the research station and its telescopes.

I met Matthew in 2015 when he joined our volunteer paleontology field program, five years after his Antarctica experiences.

He had completed his master’s degree and was teaching art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He stood out among the volunteers as especially hard-working, dedicated, and serious about our scientific mission. He became an integral member of the field crew, so teaming up with MIAD was a natural progression for us.

The undergraduate field course is available to all students who have an interest in dinosaurs or paleontology, and for non-science students, our course might be their only opportunity to do field science. In 2018, Matthew selected 7 of his students to join the fieldwork. Each was expected to keep a daily illustrated diary of their work and their finds. Since then, he has participated in our field course as an instructor of students from MIAD. During our summer program, we collect fossils from the badlands of Montana on public lands that are eroded out of the Hell Creek

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Matthew Warren Lee, Great Horn Antenna, 2012. Oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches.

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Howard Leu

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Matthew’s works emphasize verticality, whether it be a column in a classical ruin, a blazing tree, a radio telescope, a neutrino detector, or a mountain, the oppressiveness of the ground and sky are resisted by their reach.

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Formation (HCF). The Hell Creek Formation is a division of mostly Upper Cretaceous with some lower Paleocene rocks, named for exposures along Hell Creek, near Jordan, Montana. The formation stretches over portions of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. This unit of rock was deposited during the last million years of the age of dinosaurs and contains fossils from the entire ecosystem, including plant fossils, the bones of fish, amphibians, lizards, crocodylians, and, of course, dinosaurs. These remains were buried by the ancient river system flowing east from the young Rocky Mountains and eventually fossilized underground before erosion brought them to the modern surface.

Each year, we apply to the Bureau of Land Management for two sets of permits: the first, to surface collect fossils that have eroded from the rocks and fallen onto the ground, and the second, to continue or start quarries—the large holes that we dig to retrieve the skeletons of massive dinosaurs, such as Triceratops. Our scientific goals are to document the changes in flora, fauna, and geology that were abruptly truncated by the great dinosaur extinction event.

Those goals cannot be achieved without the help of a great number of people, and we rely on college students and volunteers from all walks of life, from pipefitters to landscape painters.

The Hell Creek Formation has a special scientific significance because it is the last layer of rock that was deposited in the American West before the mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian (non-bird) dinosaurs, clearing the path for our own future. Our field area is unique in that it encompasses the boundary between the age of dinosaurs and the age of mammals. While prospecting for fossils, we often cross that existential line in a step. The HCF is where ends beget origins, and our field area is a place that inspires reflection and lends our work a deep purpose in the mission of the scientific enterprise.

Yet some of my best memories of summer fieldwork in the Hell Creek Formation are not of collecting fossils in the badlands, but of time spent inside the little house that we live in out there. After each excursion to the field, Matthew would sit at the long dining room table making detailed notes and sketches of fossils that he found that day. As a scientist, I find it is most rewarding to witness the magic of the creative process happening in front of me, evidence of Matthew’s deep level of commitment and engagement with our overall mission, the recovery of evidence of a lost world.

Paleontology and the HCF have become an important point of reference for Matthew’s art, as seen in his sketchbook and in paintings like Una Historia Una Veritas. What I see in Matthew’s art is humanity poised at an important and vulnerable moment in history.

We are 300 years downstream from the Enlightenment, and despite the many scientific and technological advances made since then, the thought nags that the scientific endeavor may be fleeting. Time is vast, space is vast, the planet is vast, and so too is the probability of civilizational collapse. In the juxtaposition of landscape, fossils, technology, habitations, and the capricious sky, Matthew’s works capture the achievement, the vulnerability, and the potential ruin of our moment.

Our species is 230,000 years old, and only in the past 400 years, since Galileo, have we had the scientific method to help us understand our planet. Our current moment of paleontology, radio astronomy, and genomics was not inevitable, and given the vagaries of human behavior and a deteriorating planetary climate, it is not

Howard Leu

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Matthew Warren Lee’s studio.

guaranteed to last. Matthew’s paintings capture the extremes that humanity is willing to suffer to hold this moment for all it is worth: telescopes built in the most extreme and dangerous places on Earth (The Diligent Truth, Rainspell, The Tempest) and fitted into crevices in cities. His art shows the window of scientific opportunity wide open and dazzling, but vulnerable to human fallibility and the power of Nature.

In terms of iconography, Matthew’s works emphasize verticality; whether it be a column in a classical ruin, a blazing tree, a radio telescope, a neutrino detector, or a mountain, the oppressiveness of the ground and sky are resisted by their reach. Matthew’s paintings emphasize that in our quest for knowledge we stretch upwards as far as we can reach, though we are gravitationally held to the Earth.

Now that the James Webb Space Telescope has attained its millionmile distant orbit, the upward-facing instruments have a special poignance: the earth-bound telescopes point toward their aloft descendant in a harmonious reception of data.

Many of Matthew’s oil paintings are reminiscent of Albert Bierstadt, a popular landscape painter of the mid-1800s whose mountains were high and jagged and majestic and whose skies were striking. Other depict more bucolic scenes, calling to mind Frank Church, another leading painter of the Hudson River School of artists. In fact, Matthew has titled some of his works after these early painters. In many of these scenes, and in his more fantastical landscapes where geologic features take on large crystalline shapes,

there sits the scientific instrument, alone or in an array, seeking more data, more knowledge. Because many of his paintings are fairly large he makes advance pencil sketches to get the correct perspective, particularly if a scientific array is featured. These perspective drawings themselves are beautiful works and reveal Matthew’s skill as a draftsman.

The scientific instruments that appear frequently in Matthew’s work—a dish-shaped radio telescope and a neutrino detector—are tools that have helped to uncover the fact that we live 13.8 billion years downstream of the Big Bang. They speak to the place of our civilization in the history of the Universe. Since the quantum origin event of the Universe, it has been expanding at an ever-faster pace.

We live at a fortunate moment in the history of the Universe: our neighboring galaxies can still be observed. Scientists estimate that in a trillion years, our descendants (if we have descendants) will be unable to observe any other galaxies because the distance between them will be too great for the speed of light to overcome.

At the universal scale, radio telescopes on the ground can overcome today’s relatively short intergalactic distances. The radio telescopes and neutrino detectors in Matthew’s paintings are icons of the fulfilled promise of science: extending our reach to enhance our understanding. The instruments are often the focal point of his paintings, whereas the builders and users of the instrumentation are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the white and gleaming artifacts of scientific progress stand in for the facilitators of triumph—we can

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Megan Seitz

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Thomas Carr (second from left) and Matthew Lee (third from left) with faculty and students from MIAD and Carthage College at the Croc and Gar microvertebrate site in Montana, July 2021. The survey takes place on public lands with permission of the Bureau of Land Management.

The radio telescopes and neutrino detectors in Matthew’s paintings are icons of the fulfilled promise of science: extending our reach to enhance our understanding.

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deduce their motivations, as searchers, from the corolla-like dishes alone.

In addition to overcoming intergalactic spatial distances, telescopes also overcome temporal distance. The electromagnetic radiation from galaxies that is received by telescopes has traveled in straight lines from stars to Earth at the speed of light, which means that it has taken time to reach us. The light from other stars and galaxies that we see at night is fossil light: a photon that arrived here today from a distant star may have started its journey 66 million years ago, coinciding with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but arriving now, given its distance from Earth.

When we use telescopes to view the night sky, everywhere we look, we see into the past. In Matthew’s work, the radio telescope and neutrino detector are emblems of civilization’s triumph in our quest to understand the Universe, our place and time in it, and our ability to use physics and technology to overcome the long isolation from the rest of the Universe imposed by space and time. Juxtaposed with fossils, radio astronomy and paleontology are revealed as parallel projects.

There is often an interesting disconnect between an artist’s intention and the audience’s interpretation of a work. Take Matthew’s painting, Una Historia Una Veritas, in which I see a statement on the impermanence of the scientific moment. However, Matthew has written that the painting “reimagines Montana as a scientific utopia, covered in immaculate specimens with a massive telescope holding vigil over the tableau.” Perhaps an important role

Profile

of art is to inspire new trains of thought, no matter how different from the artist’s intent.

The painting is a striking one for me, since complete immaculate specimens are the exception, not the rule. In a sun-addled frame of mind after several hours of fruitless prospecting, I am desperate to find even one identifiable scrap of bone or a tooth. So, at the most basic level, the painting represents the most optimistic end of the spectrum of fieldwork. Last summer Matthew and I shared the experience of approaching that end of the spectrum when we prospected an area that we had never before explored.

The American West is divided into a checkerboard of roughly one square mile sections of land. Some sections are private land owned by ranchers, and others are public lands leased to ranchers for livestock or agriculture. Public lands are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The public lands to which we are permitted access is extensive, and there are a number of sections we’ve been unable to visit simply because we are still busy collecting at sites where we’ve been for years.

Last year we decided to venture to new and distant sections of public land. Matthew was part of the first team to explore the first section, and within a couple of hours, he found three Triceratops skeletons weathering out of the hills. Usually, in the more thoroughly picked-over sections we’d been working, we would find perhaps one new Triceratops locality in a four-week field season.

A day or two later, I found three more Triceratops localities to the west of Matthew’s find. One of our standard practices is to let our field participants name the new fossil localities they find, which brings us to another of Matthew’s interests, mathematics.

Mathematics, the pure language of science, is an interest that appears in Matthew’s series of engineering drawings that include meticulous diagrams of involutes and thrackles (a type of graph in which points must touch in a particular way). He named his Triceratops localities after notable mathematicians: “Conway’s Thrackle” for English mathematician John Horton Conway’s thrackle conjecture; “Ramanujan’s Taxi” for an amusing anecdote about Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s insights into a taxicab number; and Mirzakhani’s Torus for Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who studied the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces.

Matthew’s interest in mathematical structures includes the Golden Spiral, which is featured subliminally in paintings like Una Historia Una Veritas and The Ancient Cluster, and is fully rendered in his preparatory drawings. Spirals occur spontaneously in nature: in the arms of spiral galaxies, the coils of a nautilus shell, ripples in a vortex, and in clusters of leaves and petals. In Matthew’s works, the spiral becomes a means for Nature to know itself, mediated by human consciousness, however brief that may be.

I formulated the motto Una historia, una veritas (one history, one truth) as a graduate student, and it is has since become the motto of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology. It neatly summarizes the CIP’s alignment with the overall project of Science: to recover the single history of Earth and, by extension, its place in the history of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the Universe. The motto is a logical extension of the scientific method, which holds that the Universe is knowable by systematic observation and hypothesis testing. All available evidence tells us that the Universe has a single, knowable history. Science is a truly unique intellectual endeavor,

one that seeks to undermine its own knowledge claims with skepticism and experiment. It is that rigorous process of self-testing that has allowed us to sort fact from fiction, to advance from mere stargazing to the sophisticated Sloan sky survey (a three-dimensional map of the universe) in only a few centuries. I am gratified that Matthew has used this motto as the title for one of his paintings.

Matthew Warren Lee is a scientist’s artist—he combines mathematics, geology, osteology, landscape, technology, and sky in his art in a way that is consistent with the goals and challenges of science.

In his paintings, science and art are working together to recover the origins of all things, and there is no boundary between humanity and our evolutionary history. His art is a companion to the science, showing that this human endeavor is itself a product of Nature, with all of the attendant risks of environment, climate change, motivation, conflict, and time. His work illustrates what is possible when artists participate in the scientific enterprise, and how that participation benefits our civilization.

Thomas D. Carr is Associate Professor of Biology at Carthage College, Director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology, and Senior Scientific Advisor to the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha. He studies the evolution and growth of tyrannosaurs, the lineage of predatory dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex.

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Yazmin Bowers

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South Shore of Lake Superior.

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AUTHENTIC SUPERIOR: BRANCHING OUT ON THE SOUTH SHORE

BY H O PE McLEO D

T

he creative sector of Northern Wisconsin, prior to the pandemic, was supported primarily by visitors searching

for escape and enchantment. And when these visitors stopped coming to the South Shore—home to the Apostle Islands Lakeshore, Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua, a host of beautiful beaches, and quaint shops and galleries—stores shuttered, and art fairs and performances were canceled.

The region’s artists, artisans, and food producers retreated to their barns and studios to contemplate the future. In those dark days, Erin Hutchinson, an entrepreneur and consultant from Herbster, hatched an idea that created new possibilities for this unique community.

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Lisa Asp

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Erin Hutchinson

Authentic Superior was inspired by the magic and natural beauty of the South Shore of Lake Superior. But the true meaning lies in the hearts, minds, and stories of the people.

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“In 2019 I was having conversations around this idea of a locally sustainable economy,” says Hutchinson, who has experience helping launch small businesses and tech start-ups. Inspired by these discussions, she founded two new businesses, Bark Point Ventures, a property management service for short-term rentals of lakefront and woodsy vacation properties, and Authentic Superior, a nonprofit for creative producers in the South Shore region.

The property management service offered safe short-term lodging during the pandemic, which helped revitalize visitor traffic.

The service also provided an Honor Bar at each rental property, which is what jumpstarted Authentic Superior. Rather than liquor and soft drinks, the Honor Bar included an array of locally produced, non-perishable goods such as books, homemade soaps, organic skin products, and honey. In 2021 the bar expanded to include Community Sustained Agriculture (CSA)—locally sourced fresh vegetables, fruits, cheese, meats, and fish delivered to the doorsteps of those short-term rentals.

One of the farmer-producers, Claire Hintz of Elsewhere Farm, recalls, “I probably had a couple CSA shares of vegetable boxes going out every weekend all summer long.” And once people were masked and vaccinated, they came directly to the farm to pick up fresh eggs, pork, and sausage for their home-cooked meals.

Because of the success of the Honor Bar, Hutchinson fast-tracked Authentic Superior. During the first year (2020) she established a brand, a logo, nonprofit status, and a virtual marketplace featuring 30 South Shore creative producers. In 2021 the marketplace expanded to 100 creative producers with another 100 joining in 2022.

During the summer of 2020, when the annual Herbster and Cornucopia art studio tours were canceled due to the pandemic, Hutchinson provided virtual tours by filming artists in their homes and posting the videos on the Authentic Superior website.

A tireless advocate for creative producers, Hutchinson receives no salary for her work, which includes managing marketplace orders that in the first year grossed $30,000. All of the proceeds are distributed to the producers.

By 2021, Hutchinson was exhausted. She experienced debilitating health issues that slowed her down considerably. To support her passion project, she applied for, and was awarded, a Rural Generator Fellowship in August 2021 by Springboard for the Arts in Minneapolis. The fellowship allowed Hutchinson to step back a little and delegate more as volunteers begin to share the load. She explains that these two-year fellowships support artists, makers, and grassroots organizers who are advancing the role of art, culture, and creativity in communities of 50,000 people or fewer across the Upper Midwest. Recipients receive $10,000 and opportunities to attend retreats with other fellows.

“Everything we do at Authentic Superior has been based on what the creative producers have said they need,” says Hutchinson who, after her first retreat in October, has more ideas percolating.

“I’ve spent a lot of time connecting with other organizations, like Chequamegon Bay Area Arts Council and UW Extension, finding out what the economic development folks are doing and what ways Authentic Superior could help bring more revenue and economic development to create a more locally sustainable economy.”

Hutchinson’s big dream includes establishing a worldwide distribution network for creative producers while simultaneously

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Claire Hintz of Elsewhere Farm.

reducing the carbon footprint of well-meaning visitors who unwittingly threaten the very places they love. This has happened elsewhere around the state and could happen in places like Bayfield, where Applefest brings over 60,000 people in one weekend to a town with a population of 520.

“I want to build relationships, which is part of the initial development with the marketplace, on a smaller scale. Then we can provide a wider distribution network surrounded by sales and marketing support,” says Hutchinson.

By December 2021, Hutchinson had updated the Authentic Superior website with new offerings for Christmas shoppers, ranging from textiles, jewelry, fine arts and crafts, to gift baskets containing local food items. Sales have ebbed and flowed during these first two years with high points such as a large order from Google for Christmas gift baskets distributed to employees.

In January 2022, Hutchinson continued to tweak the website, adding a creative producer directory and comprehensive events calendar. She’s also looking into using Rural Generator funds to open a physical location with a storefront, warehouse, distribution center, and a learning center for producers to share ideas and improve their business and marketing skills.

The authentic part of Authentic Superior was inspired by the magic and natural beauty of the South Shore of Lake Superior. But the true meaning lies in the hearts, hands, and stories of the people.

Here are some of those people and their stories.

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rin Hutchinson’s parents both came from farming families.

She spent half of her childhood on her mother’s six-generation dairy farm in Ohio and the other half in Madison, where her father worked as a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

“We grew up doing chores and learning how to milk. My grandpa was actively farming most of my childhood. My mom's whole family lived within a few miles of the family farm and were still farming.

She wanted to make sure we grew up in that environment.”

Hutchinson learned how to bake, and she crafted wedding cakes for her rural community. She graduated from high school two years early, at age 16, and became an assistant baker. She later attended clown college through UW–Madison Extension, earning a certificate in clowning.

By her early 20s, Hutchinson had helped launch two food service businesses, a café, several clothing stores, and a small video chain.

She went back to school and earned a degree in creative writing

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Poplars mosaic.

and a doctorate in clinical psychology. Each step of the way, she learned more about people, business, and how to trust her instincts, which were to stay open to life and its possibilities, whether dressed in a clown suit or moving to California to help launch a software company, which she did in 1998. Following her instincts again, she started a design and marketing firm in Minneapolis, Narrative Shift, which often required “escape and enchantment” trips to the South Shore of Lake Superior. Finally, her instincts guided her to purchase a home on Bark Point in 2017, where she’s been working her entrepreneurial magic ever since, gathering creative producers on the South Shore into an Authentic Superior family.

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homas (Tom) and Elizabeth (Betsy) Peacock joined the Authentic Superior family in 2020. Tom and Betsy are a husband-and-wife, author-publisher team who have ties to the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Betsy’s father was from Red Cliff, where she’s an enrolled tribal member. Tom’s father was also from Red Cliff, and his mother came from the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Tom grew up in that community and is

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an enrolled tribal member. Today the Peacocks live in the town of Russell near Red Cliff.

Upon retirement, these professors at the University of Minnesota-Duluth started Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing, a nonprofit focused on Native-themed children’s books by Native authors and illustrators. The company is the first of its kind in the nation.

They published their first books in 2019, Rez Dog, Grasshopper Girl, and Gitige, and received permission to sell Tom’s books, which are published by other companies.

“Our biggest customers are schools, and in the Twin Cities at Birch Bark Books and Hennepin County Library,” Betsy reports.

“We have books in almost every state, including Canada, mostly in libraries, schools, bookstores, and gift shops.”

Each Peacock plays a role in the business: Tom as writer and editor, Betsy as editor, publisher, and marketing genius.

“Betsy’s relentless. She has sold more books than the bookstores,” says Tom, who spends most of his time writing books. “When I left academia, I ran out of things to say with the Ojibwe history and

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culture books, which I did for years. But I still had new stories in my head that I needed to put down and thought I could get the same message across by doing fiction, which I find much more enjoyable and a lot easier.”

While Tom writes fiction, Betsy oversees the business. “I was concerned in March 2020, when the pandemic hit, because we had four new books coming out and 1,500 copies already printed of each one. Since book signings and book events were canceled, those books went into our bedroom,” Betsy explains.

The Peacocks isolated, and Betsy went right to work contacting past customers and looking for new ones.

“It’s quite different from going face-to-face and having the books in hand. But sales were amazing,” she says.

In 2020, they published Takoza, Boy from Pickerel Lake, and Animals of Turtle Island, books in which animals speak in Dakota and Ojibwe. In Rabbit and Otter Go Ricing, the story is told in English and Ojibwe. In 2021 they published 14 more books, including Voices Rising, an anthology of work by Native women writers. They also ventured into the adult market with artist Sam

Zimmerman’s Following My Spirit Home, an art book with stories to accompany his paintings.

Betsy explains their business model. “We are nonprofit. Our business has grown and we even have our books on Amazon. But our authors have rights to their books and can order them anytime. They receive full proceeds on all sales.”

In the first weeks of the pandemic, Hutchinson reached out to the Peacocks to invite them to participate in the Bark Point Ventures Honor Bar. Later they also joined the Authentic Superior marketplace. The Peacocks appreciate the community spirit of the organization. And Hutchinson appreciates the way this couple roots their business in Native values with a commitment to equal opportunity for all their artists, something she aspires to with Authentic Superior.

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omen represent the fastest growing demographic in agriculture. In 2019, the USDA reported that 51 percent of farming operations had at least one woman operator, and that 36 percent of small farms in the U.S. are owned and operated by women. At least

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Erin Hutch inson

three of those women live on the South Shore of Lake Superior, women who sustainably transform tough landscapes into verdant ecosystems rich in bio-diversity. One of them is Dr. Claire Hintz of Elsewhere Farm in Herbster. With advanced degrees including a doctorate in sustainability education, Hintz could be teaching at a university. But she chooses to farm because growing food, she says, is the most tangible, edible response to the problems of the world.

Located in the frost belt at the bottom of pro-glacial Lake Duluth, Elsewhere Farm consists of 40 acres of clay loam soil. Since purchasing the property in 2000, Hintz has turned these acres into a permaculture farm with a unique, hand-dug market garden modeled after chinampas, a traditional Mexican form of wetland agriculture. Elsewhere Farm is a thriving CSA-based operation with 700 fruit and nut trees, a wide variety of shrub fruits, a market garden featuring heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable varieties, a greenhouse, a hoop house, and an herb and flower garden. Elsewhere Farm is also home to 160 laying chickens, 21 Guinea hogs, and at the heart of it all, a classroom where, before the pandemic, Hintz hosted a variety of workshops. Since the pandemic, life has changed on her farm, she says, and for the better.

“I've been working from home and doing home deliveries now for a year and a half. I love it. I connect with friends online, and go to conferences that way too. Life is great,” she says. In 2020, Hutchinson invited Hintz to join the Honor Bar to provide CSA boxes to her Bark Point Ventures customers. This income helped compensate for Hintz’s lost farmers’ market sales during the pandemic.

“Authentic Superior gives us a chance to show off the character of our little corner of the world in all of its diversity, and the products of our hard work and tenacity, living in the beautiful cold far north. That's the biggest gem of this project.” Hintz says Authentic Superior is a boon for the area, “because we're all organized under one banner, which means we’re more able to attract grant dollars for some of the development that we want to do that preserves the character of the region.”

Authentic Superior, she says, is equivalent to the Fair Trade concept in the international marketplace, helping to provide a livelihood for farmers and artists making locally produced products.

“We started out being involved in Authentic Superior as a way to market our products. Now that we're all connected, we have the relationships to go after other issues that might otherwise be obstacles to developing our small businesses.”

Hintz is ready for spring, which brings more CSA boxes to pack and deliver, more piglets, more chicks, and more of everything on this ever-expanding, crazy-quilt permaculture farm.

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osaic artist, Rebecca Campbell, joined Authentic Superior in 2020. “It's such a strong builder of community and brings so many people together. It’s not a competition, because the intent is to build everybody up and give everyone an opportunity to show their work and sell it.

Campbell was an art teacher in the Ashland School District for 30 years. “I started making mosaics in about 2002 while teaching a class to my students. Before that, I was a painter. I still paint but since my retirement in 2015, I cover my paintings with tiles.”

Cobalt and Caribbean blues. Moss green and herringbone. She jigsaws her tiles into complex images that reflect the light and

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Above: The Forever Sky by Thomas Peacock (Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing).

Below: The Little People and the Water of Life by Ronda Snow (Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing).

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Fergus, mosaic.

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Erin Hutchinson

Erin Hutchinson

Hope McLeod

Erin Hutchinson

Wooden bowl by Dale Paulsen.

Wooden bowl by Dale Paulsen.

Raw edge eagle bowl by Dale Paulsen.

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beauty of her 60-acre homestead. Campbell works from series of photographs, which she combines into one composite image. Often, she repeats a theme in her paintings, like pieces of broken china whose pattern once contained an entire song with musical staff, notes, and a time signature.

“I was walking in the woods with my granddaughter one day, when she was two and a half, and she just started singing a song.

When she was done, I asked her, ‘Where did you learn that song?’

She looked at me like I was an idiot, and said, ‘In the woods.’ These pieces always go into my woodland landscapes.”

Campbell has sold quite a few paintings through the Authentic Superior portal. After seeing her work online, some customers have contacted her directly, visited her studio, and then returned home to make purchases through Authentic Superior.

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ale Paulson worked in the north woods as a career sawyer and logger. After retirement he took up beekeeping with his wife, Cathy, and wooden bowl-making. He had noticed the beauty of wood when he was cutting down trees for a living. “What I like to do is find quality character pieces. I'm always looking for them while logging or after a storm,” he says in a video Hutchinson made during the canceled 2020 Herbster/Cornucopia art tours.

He’s still using wood today from trees downed in a tornado in 2019. He prefers birch, and maple, which works best for “spalting,” a coloring technique that employs the natural decay process in wood caused by white rot fungus. The result, which takes two years to achieve, looks like frothy whipped cream stirred into espresso.

“I’ll shape a bowl from a piece like this one (an un-spalted bowl), and bury it in this sawdust pile over here, which will preserve it.

But, also, the fungal mycelium is working at it to make some nice decorations.”

No felled tree goes to waste in his woods. “I let Mother Nature work on it for a year or two. She'll put her design in it, and it's my job to expose it.”

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rin Hutchinson also lets nature take its course with Authentic Superior. Last fall she met and collaborated with Nicole Foster, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Community Development at Northland College, who has brought new elements to the organization. Together they hosted a series of listening sessions in the community to find out what creative producers need to improve their economic situation.

“We heard people saying, ‘We need this force that helps connect us all and that supports growth for everyone,’” Hutchinson recounts.

“It’s like when you have a new tree or a new plant, you need to have a stake to support its growth…we want to help that tree grow and get its branches out into the world.”

With the arrival of Authentic Superior, more opportunities for growth have taken root for the creative sector of Northern Wisconsin, including an award from Google worth up to $10,000 a month of free advertising, indefinitely, to help attract more customers worldwide. Hutchinson is planning a series of outdoor art-focused events and studio tours this summer to further support this creative community, making their work available both to those visitors who travel to Lake Superior’s enchanting South Shore, and those who visit virtually.

Authentic Superior gives us a chance to show off the character of our little corner of the world in all its diversity, and the products of our hard work and tenacity, living in the beautiful far cold north.

Hope McLeod is an award-winning journalist, poet, and songwriter who lives in Washburn. She’s published two books: The Place We Begin, a collection of poetry, and Have I Got a Story for You, a compilation of her best newspaper stories.

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@ Watrous GALLERY

Lois Bielefeld, Naya, Darrell, and Annie, 2018.

Borealis, Kinfabula, 2022. Installation detail.

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@ Watrous GALLERY

SEE TH E EXHI BITI O N On view at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts 201 State Street Madison

LOIS BIELEFELD New Domesticity COMFORT WASIKHONGO Bodies Of Knowledge BOREALIS Kinfabula APRIL 15 – JUNE 12, 2022 Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following sponsors for their support of this exhibition.

Comfort Wasikhongo, Jim Jones at the Statue of Liberty, 2012.

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Savanna Institute

Essay

Lily Springs, a 100-acre regenerative agriculture farm in Polk County near Osceola, grows perennial crops including elderberries, nuts, and herbs, which sequester carbon and help prevent runoff from entering local waterways.

AGROFORESTRY AS A NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTION

BY REN EE GASCH

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Savanna Institute

Essay

Wandy Peralta of Branches and Berries Farm in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area partners with the Savanna Institute to educate farmers about food safety in agroforestry systems.

A

lthough this year is off to an unusually dry start, it is likely to stand out as an anomaly among the

wetter and warmer years that are forecast to come. It’s expected that annual crop fields will flood, perennial crops will bud earlier, and extreme weather will continue to threaten the sustainability of Wisconsin farms, as it did last year. The effects of climate change have arrived in the Midwest, and Wisconsin’s farmers are experiencing them acutely.

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Essay

When it comes to addressing the changing climate, perennial crops (plants that live more than two years and often for many decades) offer the state a transformative opportunity. With deeper and more extensive roots, perennial crops can absorb more water and bind up more soil and nutrients to help protect against flooding.

Perennial tree crops especially are highly efficient at storing carbon, pulling it out of the atmosphere and sinking it into their stems, branches, trunks, and the ground via large root systems in a process called carbon sequestration. As societies move to respond to climate change, multifunctional perennial agriculture systems that incorporate trees are receiving attention and massive investment as one of the globe’s leading natural climate solutions.

Wisconsin farmers have long planted trees on their farms as a conservation practice. Windbreaks of trees on the perimeter of fields, for example, were promoted heavily by the government during the 1930s Dust Bowl years as a way to prevent wind erosion of exposed soil. The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service still provides cost-sharing programs to encourage farmers to adopt agroforestry, a term used to describe farming systems that incorporate trees. The program today goes far beyond windbreaks and riparian buffers along rivers and streams. It now includes alley cropping, which alternates rows of trees or shrubs with rows of annual crops; silvopasture, where trees and shrubs are planted in rows or in a random savanna-like arrangement that allows sunlight to reach the ground layer grasses that provide livestock grazing; and forest farming. All of these are agroforestry practices that Wisconsin farmers and landowners currently use to employ trees as a natural climate solution.

L

ily Springs Farm, a 100-acre farm near Osceola in northwest Wisconsin, focuses on regenerative agriculture and grows perennial crops such as elderberries, nuts, and herbs. Lily Springs staff describe their land stewardship as inspired by Indigenous practices, acknowledging the local Dakota, Anishinaabe, and Ho-Chunk who are the First Nations in the area. Elderberries, for example, are tall shrubs native to the region, and humans here have used them as food and medicine for millennia. The benefits of elderberry bushes to the ecosystem are many. They sequester carbon, prevent soil erosion, and provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, all while growing nutritious and profitable food for local communities.

Located on the Horse Creek Watershed, Lily Springs Farm plays an important role in filtering water runoff before it feeds into the Greater St. Croix Watershed and the Mississippi River. “Our agricultural practices directly affect the watershed,” says Elle Sullivan, a farm manager at Lily Springs. “We’re part of an interconnected system that requires a lot of attention and care.”

Trees planted along the waterways at Lily Springs create a riparian buffer that acts as a natural flood barrier. The tree root systems hold in soil and capture nutrients before they enter the waterway. The trees’ multiple trunks are physical barriers that slow flow and enable natural levees to form. As Wisconsin prepares for more flooding in the changing climate, agroforestry systems with riparian buffers are critical to increasing the state’s resilience and protecting local freshwater resources. According to a 2020 study, 39 million acres of cropland across the U. S. could be converted

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into riparian buffers, windbreaks, and alley cropping, which could sequester 71 million tons of carbon annually.

Unfortunately, over the last 25 years, mature windbreaks on many Wisconsin farms have been cut down to make it easier to move mobile overhead sprinkler systems across larger fields. Riparian buffers have been removed to gain additional acres of corn to capitalize on demand for corn-base ethanol. Small dairies have been consolidated into larger operations. Former pastures are now in crops of corn and alfalfa for silage, and cattle are confined and fed silage year round. Reversing these trends and investments may require considerable persuasion.

Wisconsin, however, has several organizations focused on helping landowners make these changes. Lily Springs, for example, has an ongoing partnership to train agricultural apprentices with the Savanna Institute, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that works to advance agroforestry in the Midwest. Savanna Institute collaborates with farmers and scientists to share knowledge, conduct research, and educate the public about agroforestry practices thereby laying the groundwork for widespread adoption across the region.

S

ilverwood County Park is a 300-acre Dane County agricultural park near Edgerton, along the Rice Lake shoreline, where the Savanna Institute runs an agroforestry demonstration site. It is one of several sites in the Midwest established by the Savanna Institute to conduct research and educational programming for the public.

Along Silverwood’s field edges, visitors can see windbreaks lined with American plum, poplar, and oak trees, and black currant bushes, which help hold soil and retain moisture, and keep herbicide drift out. In another area of the park, a food forest filled with diverse fruit and nut species becomes a tasting orchard during Silverwood’s community events. At the heart of the park is an alley crop field with alternating rows of chestnut and walnut trees and elderberries growing alongside organic annual crops that local farmer Mark Doudlah plants and harvests each year. Last year he planted sunflowers; he planted soybeans the year before. By allowing multiple crops to be grown on each acre, alley cropping increases biodiversity within farming systems and, according to a 2018 study, has the potential to increase production 200%.

Some might wonder why chestnuts were chosen as a crop at Silverwood. The chestnut is not native to Wisconsin and is better suited to forests of the Appalachian region. In addition, American chestnuts were almost wiped out by a fungal blight years ago, and the species remains highly susceptible. The Savanna Institute is undertaking a program to grow chestnuts that are a cross between the American tree and a Chinese species that is fairly resistant to blight. The Institute is anticipating that by the time the trees are well along in their growth, the climate in Wisconsin will be warmer and wetter, more like the Appalachians where the chestnut once thrived.

Over time, Silverwood visitors will witness the alley crop system changing as the trees mature. In about ten years, the Savanna Institute will plant more shade tolerant annual crops, as the tree canopy expands. By the system’s twentieth year, Silverwood will have mature chestnut and timber trees and potential for silvopasture—a system where some of the trees are harvested for wood, which opens

Savanna Institute

Essay

Savanna Institute

Elle Sullivan, Interim Farm Manager at Lily Springs, educates Midwest farmers and apprentices about growing American elderberries.

Cows graze among rows of black currants in a silvopasture system at Branches and Berries in Crawford County.

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Essay

Barbara Decré, Savanna Institute’s Wisconsin Community Agroforester, uses social media as an outreach tool to connect with beginning farmers interested in agroforestry.

Windbreaks, riparian buffers, alley cropping, silvopasture, and forest farming are all agroforestry practices that Wisconsin farmers and landowners use to employ trees as a natural climate solution.

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the system to more sunlight, enabling grasses to thrive and livestock to graze on forage among the remaining tree crops.

Alley cropping systems require careful planning, not just for this year or the next but for twenty years down the road. Crops must be selected that are suited to the site’s soil and exposure and that also are compatible with one another. Some plants protect their growing space by releasing chemicals from their leaves or roots that suppress the growth of other species. Some species require more pruning, pest control, or herbicide treatment than others.

Calculating correct spacing beween plants is also critical. The transition to silvopasture means that the landowner must be able to deal with livestock or develop a working relationship with someone who is. There are challenges to this system, but it offers exciting possibilities.

Multi-story agroforestry systems like alley cropping have an enormous potential to sequester carbon, according to Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization that studies climate solutions. Alley cropping creates more options for farmers. Instead of choosing between production or conservation, farmers can achieve both and in the process sequester carbon, diversify farm income, and build resiliency on their land.

The Driftless Area in southwestern Wisconsin is a geological marvel, spanning roughly 24,000 square miles of steep hills, forested ridges, and deeply carved river valleys that were untouched by the glaciers. The geography of the Driftless Area has deeply influenced the ways people have cultivated the region. Its highly productive oak savanna ecosystems have been co-created by human and animal residents over millennia. Today the region is home to a diverse farming community, including a growing number of farmers who practice agroforestry.

Branches and Berries is a second-generation farm near Wauzeka on the lower Wisconsin River, owned and operated by the Peralta family. On about 60 acres, the Peraltas grow red currants, raspberries, aronia berries, and a collection of ornamental plants whose decorative branches are cut for local flower markets. A herd of 25 cows helps mow weeds among the berry rows and fertilize the soil while the berries are budding. This managed grazing system, silvopasture, helps improve soil quality, supports healthy livestock, and increases the farm’s overall productivity and vitality.

“It’s helping a little bit to keep this healthy and green and safe,” Wandy Peralta says, overlooking grazing in the field. “We produce healthy food, with the cows…healthy meat.”

Perhaps more than any other agroforestry practice, silvopasture has the potential to be a major natural climate solution in the Midwest. Growing trees or shrubs and forage in animal pastures could transform Wisconsin’s agricultural landscape and help make it into a carbon sink primed to pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. There are 66 million acres of pastureland in the U. S. that are ecologically appropriate for trees, and adopting silvopasture on this land could sequester 87 million tons of carbon annually, the equivalent, according to EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies, of taking over 201 million barrels of oil off the market.

Because of its enormous potential impact, Project Drawdown has ranked silvopasture in its top ten climate change solutions, with the Midwest as a target region for its adoption. Over the last year, Branches and Berries Farm has been working with the Savanna

Essay

Institute to help other farmers in Wisconsin implement silvopasture on their farms.

Monika Shea is a landscape ecologist and researcher at the Savanna Institute who lives on Wisconsin’s northernmost coast in the floodplains of Lake Superior. In 2016, the area experienced record floods when severe storms dropped up to 10 inches of rain in just 24 hours.

Shea’s research for the Savanna Institute will be critical to the success of perennial agriculture in the Midwest. She is mapping the suitability of different tree and shrub species across the region to help identify the most resilient among them. One of the next steps is to integrate information on climate change scenarios into the suitability mapping process.

“Agroforestry systems are a long-term investment. Chestnut trees, for example, start producing at around three to seven years, and can live up to 800 years,” explains Shea. “Planting trees and shrubs in the places best suited for them will help set farmers up for success.”

Back in the Driftless Area, which also experienced record floods in 2018, the Savanna Institute is setting up a farm campus in Spring Green. There, Shea’s colleagues work on breeding tree crops for the Midwest region. They are especially interested in trees and shrubs that have promising market potential. Hazelnuts, for example, are a perennial crop that represent a $7 billion global market that is set to double in the next decade. The Institute’s Spring Green campus includes a commercial-scale hazelnut planting, and staff are connecting hazelnut growers with one another to share equipment, processing facilities, and crop genetics to jumpstart the regional market.

The campus is quickly becoming an incubator for local agribusiness owners who want to help scale-up agroforestry in the Midwest.

It recently celebrated the launch of Canopy Farm Management, a business that plants trees and maintains perennial agriculture systems for landowners who may not otherwise have the time or equipment. The Savanna Institute is one of its investors along with Grantham Environmental Trust. A portion of Canopy’s profits go back to the nonprofit to help further its research, education, and outreach mission.

“Everyone has a role to play in addressing climate change, whether you are a nonprofit, a government agency, a farmer, or a business,” says Kevin Wolz, CEO of Canopy. “Climate change is coming for all of us, and we need to find ways to leverage the benefits of each sector to meet the challenge.”

Barbara Decré, a community agroforester at the Savanna Institute, is the contact for people interested in starting an agroforestry system. Originally from France, Decré earned a PhD from UW–Madison and stayed to help grow the Midwest agroforestry movement. She works with Wisconsin farmers and landowners to create long-term, sustainable plans for growing trees. “We talk about values, goals and vision for the land and then create a plan for the next ten, fifteen, and twenty years ahead,” says Decré.

“The great thing about agroforestry is that there are so many benefits…If people want to plant trees to improve soil, or because they are beautiful, or because they want to capture carbon, or for an income opportunity…It doesn’t really matter why they want to plant trees; what is important is that they want to try. We can help them make it possible.”

T

he Savanna Institute is on a mission to scale-up agroforestry across the Midwest in a big way. In the last year alone, it partnered with 86 farmers and institutional landowners to transition 2,600 acres in the Midwest to agroforestry. By 2025, it hopes to reach 10,000 acres a year. Demonstration farms like Silverwood, educational partnerships like those with Lily Springs and Branches and Berries, and scientific and market research at the Spring Green campus are all part of Savanna Institute’s strategy to transform Midwest agriculture into a natural climate solution.

“Incremental change is no longer enough,” says Keefe Keeley, Executive Director of the Savanna Institute. “Farmers need better economic options, and society needs farmers to be climate heroes.

Agroforestry can be a transformative solution that makes it possible to pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and put it to work, making farms more profitable and resilient.”

In a 2020 study, scientists found that around the world, agroforestry could sequester nearly 6 gigatons of carbon equivalent per year—more than twice any other agricultural land management approach.

Curt Meine, a conservation biologist, scholar, author, and Wisconsin Academy Fellow who lives down the road from Savanna Institute’s campus in Spring Green, collaborated with Keefe Keeley on The Driftless Reader, an anthology of writing about the region they both call home. “In Wisconsin agriculture, we’re looking at so many critical challenges,” Meine says. “Fortunately, the Savanna Institute has a positive message to share. It’s going to take a lot of big-heartedness and openness to succeed, but I believe Wisconsin agriculture can be a natural climate solution.”

Most farmers would agree that success in farming depends a great deal on listening to the land and adapting to the conditions.

As the climate continues to change, Wisconsin farmers will need to change with it. Agroforestry is a promising and proven natural climate solution for Wisconsin’s future.

Renee Gasch lives in De Pere, along the shores of the Fox River in Northeast Wisconsin where she serves on her local Sustainability Commission.

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Daniel Julio

FICTION

2021

PROTOCOL OF PRINT

BY YVETTE VI ETS FLATEN

J

elis stopped digging. She shrugged her harness off, letting the old-fashioned Exo-Shoveller drop to

the ground. Who cares, anyway. It was obsolete. It only moved up and down, and then only a maximum of fifteen inches. It had no other action; no reverse, no side-to-side and no voice control. Just an on and off button on the belt. You couldn’t find an older, more worthless model if you dug in the hardware pits for a year.

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FICTION

Bright Horn crackled to life. “JELIS? WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?” Jelis looked up at the drone floating above her, performing its standard figure-eight float. Rumor had it that its flight pattern was based on bees, but no one could be sure of that anymore. Now, pollination was done by BEAS. Botanical Eugenical Apian Synchronates, or something like that.

Jelis glared up at Bright Horn. “It’s caught up on something. I gotta dig on my own, okay?”

“ALLOWED.” With a whirr, Bright Horn lifted off, back up to its 150-foot altitude cap. Only the State’s Big Eye could go higher, up to 1,000 feet. Beyond that, it was all Homeland’s Secur-Oc, and that was something else, entirely. You didn’t want one of those breathing down your neck. Not for anything. They were nasty. But Bright Horn—they were still manned locally, and they weren’t lethal. The voice was modulated, and it could be someone from your own community running the joystick, maybe someone you ate with, or someone you slept with. Who knew, Jelis thought.

She edged her way down into the pit, careful not to slip.

These pits were goldmines. Back in the day, as the Teachers liked to say, being dramatic—way back when—back in the Warrior Century, people did not refit. Hard to believe. Nobody refitted at all. Everything went to the place they called The Dump. It took seven PhDs to figure out that wasn’t an acronym. Turned out it was just a noun from a verb.

Jelis was a Level 5 Terroir Refitter. Meaning, until her Civil Probation was over and she’d learned her lesson, she was assigned to mining in the Remotes, pits that once served villages and hamlets, whatever a hamlet was. Maybe, if she could keep straight, she could work herself up to a Level 3, or Level 2 even, to a place where they had left some trees. Her dream would be to make it up to Nautical Refitter. Her brother, Jepense, was a Nautical, but a Level 3 In-Lander, meaning he worked rivers. That could be nasty work. No visibility, especially on the Muddy. No. Her dream was the Ocean. She’d seen pictures.

Jelis tugged the shoveller aside. She was looking for aluminum, crinkly nuggets that usually looked black, sometimes shiny, in the dirt. In training, they had shown pictures of what it had looked like originally, fantastic ribbons of brilliant aluminum rolled out thin and spun onto a wood-paste carrier. They said everyone used it. Everyone. Hard to imagine, just going to your Magazine and buying a box, just like that.

Jelis scrunched down. The shoveller’s blade was caught on something.

“Shi…ugar.” Jelis morphed the curse word into an AB—Acceptable Blaspheme. Bright Horn was listening and she was trying not to get additional time added to her probation by breaking anymore Civil rules. It was a constant struggle. Obedience didn’t come easy for her. She was too much like her mother. Impatience in line, cursing, disrespect of superiors, counter-walking in public ways, theft from society. “For Christ’s sake!” she had shouted at the Court Officer. “It was two pennies! On the treadway!” Her six months for Theft From Society was extended to a year for Aggressive Disrespect of an Official. And she was off to Pit #44593299.

The shoveller pierced something, and then stalled. Jelis got down on her knees and started troweling the thick dirt aside. It wasn’t easy work. Back in the day, the early refitters layered tons of clay over the top of the pits, and then, in the years that followed, the quick-strippers came— miners out to make a buck—and they had scraped the clay around willy-nilly, looking to find the good stuff quick and get out. That meant that now, with the current Total Refit plan, workers like Jelis might find a 3-foot layer of clay, or 6-foot- or even deeper, which required the caterpillar men to come with their mobile worms and go under. That was something to see. And, the men who ran the caterpillar were prime. Not like the men around here. Jelis had put her name in for the Lotto, but then so had everyone else, and she didn’t win a ticket. A Twenty-four with a prime caterpillar man would be something like Christmas. Even a Twelve would be close.

Jelis’ trowel hit the obstruction and she scraped more of the thick clay aside. She started to curse but caught herself. It was a milk jug. There were worse things to get hung up on, yarn or fishing line, but not by much. These things were hollow, and once the blade went in, you couldn’t shake it. You had to cut it off.

Resigned, Jelis stood up and got her bandana out of her pocket. She turned the reflective mirro-lar side up to the sky and tilted it left and right several times. Level 4 got a call button.

Level 3 got a one-way radio. Level 1 and 2 had voice buds. But Level 5, a lousy shiny bandana!

What century was this, anyway?

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FICTION

Bright Horn descended and hovered. “WHAT IS THE ISSUE, JELIS?” “I’m gonna need to cut.”

“OK. BUT YOU HAVE TO USE PROPER FORM. YOU KNOW THAT. FOR THE RECORD. JELIS, YOU SHOULD KNOW BY NOW HOW TO USE PROPER FORM.” She knew how but it irritated her. It always had. It was like she was a child. Bright Horn was lecturing her like she was a child.

“AND DON’T FORGET YOUR Ps AND Ts.” Jelis held her breath and counted. Her mother had taught her to do that when she was just a wisp of a girl, with braids tied up with ribbons. Her mom sometimes called her Heidi, for some reason. And she’d also counted sometimes, too.

“Please, I would like to request the use of a blade….a knife, specifically…Jelis F. Russo, Section 8, Pit# 44593299…Thank you.”

“I’VE ALREADY DISPATCHED RACER YOUR WAY. GOOD JOB, JELIS. GOOD FORM. YOU’RE LEARNING. GOOD JOB.” Bright Horn buzzed up and away.

R

acer arrived, in his yellow coverall, his toolbelt riding jaunty on his hips, the makings of a carb-gut starting to hang over the front buckle. He was this dig’s EO—Equipment Officer— one of the Triums that oversaw the whole Remote. The others were the Production Officer and the Social Officer, who never came out to the pit itself, staying in their Quads day and night, for the most part, running the show while never seeing the show. Doing everything from a handheld.

They would die in the heat of the pit in high summer, Jelis was pretty sure. Racer, on the other hand, even if she didn’t like him, at least knew where the pit was, and like now, standing above her section, on the rim, got to experience the rising pit-plume, full-bore.

“Hey, Jeli-baby, what’s up?”

Jelis looked away. She hated the way he spoke. He spent hours streaming H-wood movies from a century ago, trying to perfect what the critics called Smartspeak. They had originally called it SmartAssSpeak, but Homeland had got onto them about corrupting the civis with profanity, so it got clipped.

“What can ol’ Racer do you for?” He smirked at her.

“I need a knife. I’m hung up on a milk jug.”

“Again? You must look for them, Jelis…”

He came down into the pit like a pro, one foot leading, the other foot sideways, dragging back, to act as the brake. “Whoo-wee, doggie! Looks like you’ve got some beauties there!” He nodded toward her bucket with the large nuggets of aluminum she’d unearthed today. “Looking good!”

He gave her a thumb’s up.

He got out his recorder and held it up between them. He arched an eyebrow at her. “By the book, Jels-baby,” he warned. “This goes straight up to Homeland, so no fudging around, fudging being one of his favorite ABs, when everyone knew he was itching to say the old thing. But Racer could control himself. He’d gone from being a private worker to official Refit School and was now an EO. He said in a low voice: “Don’t get cute.” The threat was unmistakable. Jelis nodded, icy and begrudging.

Racer cleared his throat, clicked the button, and began: the standard opening P&T, then his serial number, name, some more numbers, the Pit number, then the Request, then his Assessment of the Request and the Requestee, and ended with: “Please consider my request and Thank You for your attention.” Listening to Racer morph into this slick toneless recitation reminded her of grease and made her want to scream and vomit all at once. She hated it. False. False. False.

That was all she could think. Lying false words, shoved down their throats, to be regurgitated….. every single one of them. She was disgusted, listening to him drone on. She was disgusted with herself because now he held his recorder up to her face. It was her turn to give her PII and make herself obedient to the Homeland’s ubiquitous need to have everyone mouth the required P&T. If this was what it took to get a simple blade, she couldn’t imagine the crap you’d have to wade through to request a powersaw, like the arbormen used.

Racer’s radio clicked. Homeland’s Comfort Voice crooned: “Permission granted. Time limit: 10. As of…..now.”

Racer unclipped the metal guard of the sheath on his belt and brought out his Level 2 knife.

He handed it toward Jelis, haft first. She reached out to take it. This was a moment, now, when something like trust passed between them, this handing of the tool from one to another, this passing of the blade. Jelis’ hand was steady but her insides were wobbly with tension. When her

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FICTION

hand closed around the haft, she recognized that she now had, in her grasp, one of the things that made Homeland the most uneasy about its civis, that moment when the citizen had something akin to power. What really unnerved them was putting into a civis’ hands a tool that could also be a weapon. That’s why they watched and regulated and recorded and timed and logged and catalogued, and stored and reviewed and archived and cross-referenced every request. Daily. It had started with the logging of diesel fuel and fertilizer. Now the Department of Weaponry encompassed everything from nukes down to jump ropes and marbles. That department was larger now than even the ‘thoughts and words’ boys.

“Ready, Jelis?” Racer asked, his eyebrow arching again.

She nodded. He let go of the knife. Slowly, she turned to the offending milk jug.

“Remember,” he cautioned. “Everything you touch, everything you do is being scanned. It’s on my record, too, you know. Capiche, Jeli-baby?”

Jelis nodded. She squatted down and drove the blade into the belly of the milk jug.

Three things happened at once. The milk jug, which still had some residual casein inside, sheered apart in three sweet pieces, releasing the shoveller’s blade, Racer’s recorder started an oscillating warning tone, and State’s Big Eye drone suddenly dropped down and zoomed back and forth across the entire pit, its strobes pulsing, its loud voice announcing; ALERT! ALERT! INCOMING METEROLOGICAL ATTACK! TAKE COVER NOW! Racer turned away from Jelis, hunching his recorder inside his overall collar, trying to hear his message. Then he was shouting back into the recorder and scrambling up out of the pit. He looked back toward Jelis.

“HAIL!” he shouted. “GET BACK TO YOUR CONNIE!” He disappeared over CH RIS FI N K the rim.

“Protocol of Print” paints a dystopian nightmare where Big Brother has more elis stood still. Racer had not waited to secure his knife. The rain was eyes than even Orwell could have imagalready starting. Hard rain. Storms like this came up out of nowhere now, ined. It’s almost unimaginable how the dangerous and unpredictable. It was time to go. Jelis reached down to grab protagonist of this story is forced to toil, the shoveller’s harness with her free hand but she slipped, fell backward, and yet the author successfully treads the line then slid down on the slick clay past the milk jug, toward the bottom. “No!” of disbelief. The resolution of this specushe shouted out, in panic. The pits filled with water quickly in an attack. She lative story seems at once surprising and had to get back up to the rim, or she could drown. Her foot hit something, inevitable, which is one sure sign of a stopping her slide. She reached for it. Something black. An old-fashioned skillful hand. garbage bag. Tied with a simple overhand knot. There were lots of these in the pits still. This pit had so many that the Archeos had said they didn’t want any more reports unless the cache was really something. The refitters could take a look and decide. Unofficially, of course.

In desperation, Jelis held on to the knot, pulling herself up with one hand, digging the knife into the thick soil with the other. She was struggling to stand up just as the sky went darker and the rain began to change. It turned suddenly cold and icy, stinging her hands. She could feel the drops growing larger, striking her back and shoulders and the top of her headpiece.

Suddenly, a small tear began in the bag, opening just below where Jelis’ fingers dug into it, below the knot. She tightened her hold and the bag came loose from the soil. She slipped, going down on one knee. She caught her breath. Through the tear, she could see a square corner…some sort of pattern…the unmistakable edge of the brick-like compression of paper stacked together….

No wonder the bag was so heavy. No wonder it was like an anchor on this slippery slope to the abyss below. She had found a bag of books!

Jelis made a snap judgement. She rose up from the kneeling position slowly. She redoubled her grip on the knot, twisting the black plastic around her fist. One thrust at a time, she used the knife as a piton to work her way up to the pit’s rim, dragging the bag along. It was tough work. All the other refitters had long fled the pit.

In an instant, the sky unleashed the hail, the first pieces the size of a thumbnail. It always got worse. God knows how long this storm would last. By the look of the sky, it could be a full day event. Sometimes, it went two days. Damage to the connies—short for Constructs, their housing units—was always to be expected, to some degree. The crops…well…bye bye. Hail was the only

J U D G E’S N OTE

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FICTION

thing that grounded Bright Horn and Big Eye. That, a blizzard, or a haboob, were the only things that might disrupt Secur-Oc’s surveillance. Homeland liked to say they had everything squared away for their civis, but they were wrong about meteorology. It was bigger than they were, and they didn’t like it. Events like this would never get reported. Just like they didn’t exist. And if you talked about it more than once or twice, you’d get written up. Simple as that. It was supposed to be just like it didn’t happen.

But it was happening. The hail chunks were growing larger. They stung when they hit Jelis’ hands and arms. They hurt when they thudded down on her back, and thumped on her headpiece. One struck her cheek. Jelis was at the rim. The hail was pounding down on her now and she ran toward her connie. She was number 14. The furthest one. The ground was covered with hail pellets now. She slipped and fell flat, but she never let go of the knife or the bag. She got up and ran on, as fast as she could. She knew it was her only chance to look at the books.

The hail had grounded the drones, and the satellites’ links would be blurred by the weather. No other person was outside. Not Racer. Not any other refitter. Just her, alone, in a high-magnitude hailstorm, hauling a black bag of contraband and holding a knife, for which the ten minute permission slip had now long run out, so she was way over-time and therefore illegal, and since she was here for Civil Probation, that would be enough to get her kicked over to Maximum Penal.

Then her additional time would be spent in a Pen. Just like her mother.

But Jelis would not let go of the bag. She well knew what she was doing. She knew the Protocol of Print. She knew it was verboten to have anything printed on paper. She knew that everything she read had to be on an apparatus, either a handheld, or a screen, or a microreader. It had to have been pre-read and passed by the Censor Department, no if, ands, or buts about it. Period.

Full stop.

Refitters were always finding books. Or remnants of them. Pages here and there. Sometimes a magazine. Not the Magazine, where you bought your goods, but an earlier use of the word. Sometimes with words, sometimes with lots of pictures.

Anything printed had to be turned in. And you had to do a GPS report. And you got reassigned to a new section. Once you found print, you couldn’t work that sector because of the potential for more contamination, just like rad exposure.

A

t her connie, Jelis passed her left wrist over the entry pad to read her chip. Her connie was old, manufactured when Homeland was experimenting with a Required Perpetual Roommate. But that had been abandoned after a couple decades, so now, the rule was one connie per person, even if it was an old double-bunker. And these old connies were nuclear powered, with something they called a ‘glow-worm.’ It was old technology but dependable. Even now, in the face of this growing maelstrom, her laminated door clicked open one vertical slat at a time, and the lights powered up all around the room.

Jelis dragged the bag inside. The door clicked shut. She paused and considered the knife in her hand. Having this knife—this weapon-tool—without proper permission was a crime. A high penalty crime. She should call Racer. He would be in trouble over this, too.

She went into the galley and washed the dirt off the blade. She dried it and after a moment of calculation, she knew what she would do. Under the micro, this connie had a really old relic called a toast-oven. She pulled it open. The knife fit in it. She pushed it closed. Good enough for now.

The bag was surprisingly resistant to being torn open further. On her knees by her bedside, Jelis took out one book after another, and laid them on the rug, side by side. She could not believe the stash. They smelled, but of earth—hearty and rich—not stinking of decay….

Her bell rang. Jelis recoiled.

“Jelis, let me in. Now.” It was Racer.

Jelis went to the door. “What do you want?” she called through the slats.

“You got my knife? You better have my knife…”

“I….I lost it….” Jelis paused, for effect. “I’m sorry. I lost it in the pit.”

“You lost it?!” Racer unleashed a torrent of oaths and threats.

Jelis closed her eyes and listened to the rant on the other side of the door.

“I’m sorry. I’ll look for it tomorrow….”

Racer exploded. “We’re under mandatory lockdown. Hail predicted for 24. And there’s a Tornado Warning for the whole of Zone 19. We’re all gonna die. If we’re lucky. Before the Inspectors get the report on this… ”

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FICTION

She heard him punch the side of her connie, and then his strangled oaths gradually faded into the weather roaring outside her door.

I

n the bath-cube, Jelis stripped off her coverall and pulled on a day-shirt. She went back to the books and knelt on the rug. One by one, she read the titles, the way her mother had when she was teaching her how to read, when they’d come home from the Library. …Civil Disobedience.

The Magna Carta. The collected writings of Thomas Paine. The works of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Escape from Sobibor. Confessions of Nat Turner. Life of Nelson Mandela. The Man in the Iron Mask. Les Misérables….

From the bottom of the bag, Jelis pulled out a spiral-bound notebook. She opened the front cover. Inside, in thick marker, was written: “Political Science 410: The Mechanics of Resistance in Western Culture.” Page after page followed, full of close, neat handwriting.

The last things in the bag were two palm-sized dictionaries, Collins Latin and Collins French.

Jelis thumbed through the French dictionary. A piece of paper was stuck in toward the back on a page with the verb Être. To be.

On the opposite page was the verb Lire. To read.

Je lis nous lison

Tu lis vous lisez

il/elle lis ils/elles lisent She looked up the word Je. “I.” She looked up the word lis. “Present tense of the verb to read, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person. Je lis. I read.”

Her hands began to shake. She looked up the word pense. “First person singular of the verb penser, to think. Je pense. I think.”

Jelis sat back on her heels, her jaw slack. Then her fingers flew through the pages. Espérer. To hope. J’espère. I hope. Jespere, their little brother who had not survived their mother’s incarceration. She had died while serving a term for Conduct Unbecoming a Model Civis—for writing a letter in an underground paper protesting the closing of the local library.

Jelis knelt for a long time, considering her situation. The black bag….she would cut apart.

Smuggle bits back to the pit. The knife…she could smuggle that back too….drop it in the stormwater….or use it to bargain with Racer if he found out about the books….

Jelis pulled the mattress off the bunk. She began laying the books on the frame like a mosaic, the thicker ones toward the foot. Before she repositioned the mattress, she chose a book at random. A slim volume.

She shut off the lights, except the one on her headboard. She pummeled her pillow into the shape she liked and pulled the duvet up over her. She could hear the raging storm, the howls of rising wind and the metallic clatter of hail against her connie’s siding. She pulled the duvet closer and turned the collar on the light to narrow the beam on the book. She opened the cover carefully so as not to dislodge any of the yellowed pages. She read out loud, the way her mother would, the words of the title: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

She turned the page and began.

Yvette Viets Flaten has degrees in Spanish and history from the UW–Eau Claire. She writes fiction and poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the Wisconsin Academy Review, Hurricane Alice, Avocet, Free Verse, Midwest Review, Red Cedar, Barstow and Grand, and The Writer’s Almanac Pandemic Poetry Contest. Her short fiction has won awards in the Lakefly Writing Contest, and her pandemic short story, “La Pestilencia,” appeared in The London Reader. She lives in Eau Claire.

SPRING 2022

47

Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry Honorable Mention Poems from our 2021 Poetry Contest

Moonshot: United States Take up hammer nails and pine Build one last coffin Name it Oppression Take up brush and sheet Paint one last banner Name them in red Rayshard Brooks, 27 Atatiana Jefferson, 28 Stefon Clark, 22 Tanisha Anderson, 37 Breonna Taylor, 26 George Floyd, 46 and more Take up boots and shovel Heave open the last iron heart half a nation not grieving.

Dominic W. Holt

Dominic W. Holt is a poet and social worker in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA in creative writing and an MSW in social policy from the University of Michigan, and a BS in astrophysics from Indiana University. He interned at the Michigan Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Lunch Ticket, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, Plainsongs, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Driftwood Review, Lifeboat, Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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Poetry

Bluebird My daughter in prison plays the piano.

She plays from memory, eyes closed, her heart a violin stringing along as piano notes fall like raindrops soft while cedar trees and tulips bend to her allure there are movements musical interludes her long fingers barely touch one key before alighting on the next rolling up and down, a lift at first playful and easy, then loud in a key of meaning while low sun warms the floor and lingers like a kiss a yearning for something called love.

Enliven it now, that memory, pick up the pace.

See her at the Young Chang as I round the corner and pull into the driveway a twelve-year-old practicing on the upright so I do not park my heart at empty but at a home flowing with Sonatina in G Major by Beethoven a girl making music after her father ran away.

Except. She is only pretending I will learn, much later, how the blue bench cushion became a launch pad to an alternative universe somewhere between fear and possibility as she plucked at ragged sheet music in grief, threadbare shame, composed in a little cell with her life little now, safe and contained and cruel, and family claiming they can’t fix anything, fade into silence.

Musicians say it is the notes not played that make the song.

Meanwhile, my daughter splices quarter notes with eighths, off-key, a symphony of stones, a cacophony as by now I imagine—wouldn’t you?—she pounds each key with fury a bluebird fighting a crow for the last speck.

Kathryn Gahl

Kathryn Gahl’s favorite things (besides words) are cooking, humor, Feldenkrais, open minds, red lipstick, and dancing mad hot ballroom. Her awards include The Hal Prize for fiction and poetry. Her books include Messengers of the Gods (Cornerstone Press, 2022) and The Velocity of Love (Water’s Edge Press, 2020), which received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.

“Bluebird” is from The Yellow Toothbrush: A Memoir, forthcoming from Two Shrews Press.

SPRING 2022

49

Poetry

And if If we hedge along the deferential maybe, the suspension of a bridge, this length of edge, we still move.

If in broken tones we huff and puff, harmonizing to a shriek, or mouthing ouch, we still talk.

If sometimes we stare in opposite directions, cheek to cheek like half-clad duelists, we still touch.

And if we, the still pronoun of you & me, parallel a move, a touch, a talk, if we still do this at least, we still love.

John Pidgeon

John Pidgeon is a product of the graduate writing program at UW–Milwaukee. His credits include Poetry, Poetry Daily, Rosebud, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Wisconsin Academy Review, and The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. A collection of his poetry, The Formal Impulse, was published by the Parallel Press. He and his wife, Marianne, live in Green Bay with their five children and four grandchildren.

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Poetry

Last Hay We worked in the meadow where all day the haybine and rakes wove patterns in the green quilted rows and stitched textures of mown hay, now windrowed, drying Late, towards evening we walked over sharp stubble where the mouse’s forest and shrew’s jungle were cut where swallows shifted fast on quiet air, gathering insects now shorn of cover Thus it is as we weave each day as green is cut and dried for winter as we walk closer to our own fall where we imagined once perpetual summer Dusk drew in the coolness and the lower world went black as the sky percolated with pinpoints planets first, then the greater stars finally the great ribbon of the Milky Way I, looking up from our murmuring earth know that even the fixed stars move that all the constellations change and some day the Great Bear shall dissolve the Serpent and Cassiopeia too as shall we but so much sooner and take your hand against this night and one more time fill my head with the fragrance of your hair and new mowed hay

John Freiburger is a Wisconsin native perhaps best known for his fourteen years of talking about building science on WPR after a long career as a consultant and designer.

He attended the University of Notre Dame where he studied with Frank O’Malley. He has published poetry in various college and small journals. He farms and breeds horses with his wife, Betsy, where the hills, meadows and forests of Fitchburg remain an inspiration.

John Freiburger

SPRING 2022

51

Book Review

Waterbaby

by Nikki Wallschlaeger Copper Canyon Press, 96 pages, $16.00 Reviewed by Wendy Vardaman

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s latest poetry collection, Waterbaby, invites and resists reading. That might be frustrating, intriguing, delightful, humbling, and/or humorous, depending on your willingness to steep in these intelligent, original poems. The author of two previous poetry collections: Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (Bloof Books, 2019), and an artist book, Operation USA, she has lived in various places in Wisconsin, including Milwaukee and the Driftless region.

Wallschaeger writes in a wide range of voices and forms: dense lyrics, speculative prose poems, blues, history, the imaginary worlds of catfish, plants, and dead poets. References to water appear in every poem, intermingling with other recurring subjects, which include cleaning, labor, domesticity, motherhood, birth, slavery, racism, politics, the economy, exhaustion, and grief.

The language and events set in motion by slavery in America permeate the book: chains, middle passage, overseer, cotton, maroon, reconstruction, sugarcane, lunch counter. Like her multivalent words, grammar can’t contain the freighted meaning Wallschlaeger requires in poems such as “Middle Passage Messaging Service,” which embodies a fierce, collective resistance to decoding through sentence structure: To this day they move across our line break lives & before we are archived, lungs crackle with smoke until words form in the long struggle smuggled on impact, a thunderstorm bites & my world is a prayer with a moon & all the birds from way back but my throat is a blue cache of contraband winds, when it’s brutal please help keep our language thriving on big mama river is the word maroon.

Wallschlaeger’s intense, complex scrutiny of language, metaphor, and poetic form is another current that runs through these poems.

She invokes literary terms and forms and simultaneously empties them, as in “Prayer Sonnet” or “Anti-Elegy.” She keeps up the wordplay and double entendres through the darkest subjects: anti-elegy and Aunty Elegy; computer code and code-switching; Capitalism Hill for Capitol Hill. Or in these simultaneously funny, sad. and

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serious lines from “I’d Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism,” where song lyrics become sacred through her elevated description, and grave itself is a pun: “The elders have a saying, // the beat goes on: Earth’s fracturing livelihoods / resurrected by the rhythms of the night.”

Waterbaby’s impressive closing poem, “Mother of Thousands,” explores the language of plants and planting and the intersectional meanings of that language for women of color: “I’ve come here to climb the spiral rope back to the / knowledge of the land.” While “here” might mean Wisconsin, specifically the Driftless, it is also the poetic: received language, form, and literary traditions that have buried the individual stories and the collective story Wallschlaeger works to recover and reseed:

Underneath this land is a succulent downpour we are building from the lives calling to be excavated. The fists of Black & Brown women throughout the ages in a controlled heirloom heat. Seeds taking flight from the ancient fields of our wildflower palms for we are the mothers of thousands.

Wendy Vardaman, PhD, is the author of three collections of poems. A past poet laureate of Madison, she works as a website manager and sometimes as an editor, artist, and designer.

Book Review

Jordemoder

by Ingrid Andersson Holy Cow! Press, 84 pages, $16.95 Reviewed by Catherine Young

In Ingrid Andersson’s first collection of poetry, Jordemoder (the Swedish for “earth mother” or “midwife”), the poems serve as passionate witness to human experience, revolving around the subjects of home, immigration, the parent and child relationship, life, birth, and death. The book is organized into five sections: Daughter, Midwife, Mother, Invandrare (Immigrant), and Home. The collection is filled with beginnings and endings, and such surprising and difficult moments as in the poem “The Cycle” where predatory insects known as antlions remind the poet of a childhood companion turned murderer.

Jordemoder begins by introducing the speaker’s mother who saves graywater, fights for non-human rights, and requests a green burial.

The poet witnesses both her mother’s fire and her frailty disappearing / into the maw of entropy and art.

Throughout, the poems provide fine particular details such as “pink opossum feet land like cherry blossoms beneath the suet feeder,” and sweep the reader into the eons with images of sandhill cranes as dinosaurs or the view from a hotel window of the ancient remains of mother and child below.

Most engaging is the Invandrare section. In the liminal poem, “Rauks,” the speaker happily dangles her “knobby feet“ over Baltic Sea cliffs, imagining their geology as brainstems:

In the poem, “Maieutic,” upon seeing a pregnant woman in hijab weeping, the speaker connects powerfully with the immigrant’s grief and isolation: Sooner or later, everybody’s buffeted to the margins in pregnancy, marriage, war—all the mergings and expulsions that we are made in, die in, risk unknown borders for.

In contrast, “It Takes a Dog” captures a humorous and surprising encounter in a Swedish café with a stereotypical Texan who drawls words of wisdom and disappears before the startled speaker can respond.

At the heart of Jordemoder is the crossroads where the midwife works, the knife edge where a breath taken, or not, determines a celebration of birth and new life, or the loss and grief of death.

Andersson inhabits that crossroads and writes from there with precision, empathy, and grace.

the crusty giants once pulsing nerve centers, teeming coral

“Still Life” recounts a memory of childhood and a mother who serves perfect cardamom buns to others but denies herself. Years later the speaker, on sabbatical in her mother’s home country of Sweden, rejects such self-denial and in a café in her mother’s Swedish homeland she chooses to take for herself the loveliest bun I see, pour self-serve coffee into an Ikea cup and sit at a table with a real cloth and she realizes I want for nothing, but my mother sitting with me.

Catherine Young is author of the poetry collection Geosmin (reviewed in this issue). After working as a national park ranger, educator, farmer, and mother, she earned an MFA from The University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

She joyfully leads writing workshops and records a weekly poetry podcast. Rooted in farm life, she lives with her family in Wisconsin's Driftless region.

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Book Review

Waiting for the Fall

by Rose Ann Findlen Calumet Editions, 144 pages, $16.99 Reviewed by Nancy Jesse

“Who were you?” a stranger in the checkout line of Trader Joe’s asks Mae, in the opening story of Rose Ann Findlen’s collection, Waiting for the Fall. The past tense amuses Mae and sets in motion her musings on the “patchwork self ” she’s been stitching together since leaving the farm fifty years ago. Her daughter, Jessica, describes Mae as a straddler, a person who changes her place in society but never feels at home “either where you came from or where you’ve gone. Interesting, complicated people.” This concept runs throughout the nineteen linked, finely wrought stories. Though all the stories connect to Mae, through family or friendship, the strongest connection among them is their exploration of how these straddlers cope with change and loss, the failure of relationships, communities, and institutions, aging and death. This short story collection spans generations and landscapes, from a grandparent on a potato farm in Maine to a granddaughter adrift in a Seattle suburb.

The title story, “Waiting for the Fall,” features Mae’s return to her family farm in Missouri. It’s Christmas time, and the shambles of the farmhouse mirrors the physical state of Mae’s mother, who’s suffered a stroke, and her father, who’s going blind. Mae finds herself gasping at splintered gouges from her father’s crude home repairs or wincing at rusty screws impaling a delicate desk knob.

Broad windows of her former bedroom are now covered with garish pink insulation attached with ten-penny nails “pounded crookedly in the hand-crafted 1902 woodwork.” Although her parents graciously welcome a counselor from Home Health Services, Dad’s silence makes clear he has “made up his mind not to budge.” As Mae’s mother explains, “Your dad has to have something to do.” Mae realizes, “Now the balance lay not in their interdependent strengths, but in their mutual vulnerability.” Her parents, as well as she, “wait together for one of them to fall.”

This exploration of the changing nature of family and community continues in “The Sprite,” a powerful story set in a suburban Seattle neighborhood of “mid-century modern houses sprawling across large tree-lined lots.” Community efforts to block construction of a truck stop have proven futile, “a huge, ugly complex forcing itself onto the neighborhood” with its accompanying “noise, carbon pollution, prostitution and drug deals.” Residents, David and Harold, have caught glimpses of someone living in the woods near the truck stop. Clearly homeless and vulnerable, she reminds them of a sprite; they worry how someone so thin can survive the rainy

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season. Harry sets out food on a potting table and moves a large FedEx box into a dry corner near the house to provide the Sprite with shelter. She responds by leaving them bouquets of the neighbors’ chrysanthemums. Findlen weaves the story seamlessly so that we gradually recognize the Sprite’s connection to Mae, which is confirmed through a piece of clothing.

When we read good fiction, we enter the mind of another, and we experience another world. That is one of the pleasures of this collection. Each story reveals more about the world of the characters, adding another layer to our understanding. We come to know and love them, to worry about their dilemmas, their choices, the outcomes of their decisions. We connect with these characters, just as they are connected to Mae. These stories mirror the author’s journey from farm kid to university educator, and her writing represents and gives insight to a certain time and place. She speaks not only to those of us who came of age in the “tumultuous 1960s,” but also to those “who seek to understand them better.”

Nancy Jesse grew up on a dairy farm in Barron County, studied English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and worked for over thirty years as an educator. She lives in Madison and has published both prose and poetry and co-edited two anthologies.

Book Review

Geosmin

by Catherine Young Water’s Edge Press, 82 pages, $25.00 Reviewed by Robin Chapman

Unflinching in their catalogue of environmental loss, the poems in Catherine Young's fine collection, Geosmin, are generous in their celebration of natural life in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, where the poet lives and farms. She brings her love of place and her knowledge of environmental science to her writing. “In Dark Times We Gather Light,” the title of one of the poems, might well be the message of the book.

In these poems she shares her concern for the history of the soil and the green world as climate change arrives. Her love of language rings throughout—celebrating words like nectar, catkin, otter, and what we lose in losing them and their living objects—as in the poem “Gathering Acorns, Hoarding Words.”

If children do not know acorn, how will they play in fall with the scaly cupule of nut on a finger for a hat, or plant oak trees that will outlive them?

The book consists of four sections (Elements, Almanac, Heartbreak and Beauty, Of Origins and Aging), distinguished by geologic timescale, recurring events, personal response to landscape, and life story. In the first section, the speaker in the title poem, “Geosmin,” (from the Greek gē-: earth, and osmē´ : odor) describes the smell of earth as “slightly sweet, a kind of jasmine, / with a hint of spice…

Like the smell of beets, some say.” But she has a more serious point in mind: “Geosmin, essential perfume, leads us to water / when drought and famine are over.”

Poems in the Almanac section recount briefer seasons—fireflies, midsummer’s flowering of the basswood tree, July’s 4-H parade, collecting elderberries, and harvest—as the “last fresh apples and red cabbages / fill the fridge in pails. “Winter-Laced Lovesong” uses the metaphor of the snowshoe to tell her love “I will bear you through the fiercest storm”—no small promise in Wisconsin.

The poems acknowledge the sadness that many of us experience on winter days—and also celebrate the beauty of a “clear sky, / sun-drenched snow / where my tracks / across the new year’s field / pool blue,” and the redemptive arrival of a Wisconsin spring that brings the running of sugar maple sap and red-winged blackbirds.

In the long poem, “In Dark Times We Gather Light,” the speaker describes the work of gathering honey in childhood, mourns the bees that emerged too early to survive in capricious spring weather, and reflects, “Maybe I wish / to be nectar droplets…the honeyed smear of blooming life.” Though later, in “Passerine” she concludes: When my time is over, if I were to choose, (I’ve told my children) in the next life I would be a swallow, swoop from sky to ground.

This is a collection of poetry from a poet coming into her own, one who has gathered light in these dark times, making her own swoops from sky to ground and back again, in celebration of the inimitable landscape of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area.

Robin Chapman’s most recent poetry collection, Panic Season, is forthcoming this year, along with Raise the Green World, poems of a pandemic year and her husband’s triple bypass, available from spdbooks.org. Her poems have appeared recently in The Hudson Review and, online, on Poem-a-Day.

Read additional reviews of new and interesting books by Wisconsin authors at wisconsinacademy.org/reviews.

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Climate & Energy Spotlight

STUDENT-CENTERED ENERGY SOLUTIONS

BY ASH LEY VEDVI G

Nicholas Gagnon

Wisconsin K-12 schools are playing a vital role in incorporating innovative climate and energy solutions in the state. One initiative, the K-12 Energy Education Program (KEEP), equips educators with place-based energy education resources to help students and teachers increase their energy literacy and make their schools more energy-efficient and climate-resilient. KEEP is a program of the Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education at UW–Stevens Point and is funded by the six major utility companies in Wisconsin: Xcel Energy, Madison Gas and Electric, WPPI Energy, Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, Alliant Energy, and We Energies.

KEEP offers professional development, place-based activities, and hands-on resources that help teachers incorporate energy education into their schools and encourage responsible energy use.

KEEP also supports schools across Wisconsin participating in the national Renew Our Schools Competition. The activity is hosted

by Resource Central, a nonprofit resource conservation group in Colorado. The competition is a five-week energy conservation challenge to improve energy efficiency in schools. KEEP hosts meetings during the year for student green teams across the state to meet, collaborate, and share ideas. KEEP also offers mini-grants for high school students exploring energy education. The mini-grant process gives students experience with grant proposal writing and provides funds to explore topics in energy.

Students from Chippewa Falls High School’s Green Team, the “Heat Punchers,” wrote the following report on their mini-grant funded project.

Left to right: Nate Mason, Maddie Hunt, Adia Hardt, Kam Glamann, Bella Biederman, Taylor Simonson. Images taken by dual thermal and visual camera used to detect heat loss.

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“We used thermal imaging technology via drones and cameras to find problematic areas in our school. We began by identifying areas of heat loss, with a focus on the building’s envelope openings, like doors, windows, and vents. We’ve identified that most of the school's doors lack proper sealing and heat is escaping, causing a waste of fossil fuel and money. Now, we’re organizing and analyzing the data, prioritizing areas of low expense versus high expense. Low expense solutions include better weatherstripping for windows and doors.

Higher expense solutions include new roofs and HVAC systems.

Using thermal imaging, we’ve identified places, such as a roll-up door in the band room and most of the tech-ed classroom windows, that are losing a substantial amount of thermal energy.

“Our goal is to apply for a grant through the Energy Innovation Grant Program (EIGP) to allow us to implement the higher cost solutions to conserve heat and energy in our school. Reducing our school’s use of natural gas will decrease the amount of methane being emitted, leading to an increase in air quality, reducing health issues in humans, animals, and crops. The EIGP grant would support improvements in our school’s energy efficiency, reducing the amount of money spent on heat by up to 10%. This would improve our school along with the environment.”

Nicholas Gagnon, science teacher at Chippewa Falls High School, and these students contributed to the project and this article: Iverson Beckwith, Monte Brown, Evelyn Kelly, Karson Balsinger, Bella Biederman, Kam Glamann, Adia Hardt, Maddie Hunt, Nate Mason, and Taylor Simonson. Resource Central notes that energy is one of the highest operating costs for schools and that schools participating in this competition have saved their school districts thousands of dollars. Like these Chippewa Falls students, many others around the state are taking on the challenges of energy efficiency in their schools, learning how to produce, consume, and conserve energy responsibly. UW–Stevens Point’s KEEP program supports energy education in Wisconsin schools through hands-on opportunities and career explorations that increase student knowledge and self-confidence as they strive to become more energy efficient and climate resilient.

Ashley Vedvig has a B.S. in geography, a Masters in Natural Resources from UW–Stevens Point, and is currently working on her doctoral degree in Educational Sustainability. She is an avid reader, hiker, camper and loves spending time with family and friends.

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