Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2017

Fighting the Formidable Flying Foe Mosquito research in Wisconsin

Dancing to Hot Glass

Stephanie Trenchard & Jeremy Popelka

Mayana Chocolate Freedom Riders • •Fermenting Grimm & Litherland Dinner Train • •Meals on Wheels Fuel

Meet Angela Fitzgerald, new host of Wisconsin Life on Wisconsin Public Television.

Watch new episodes 7 p.m. Thursdays beginning Oct. 5.

WisconsinLife.org

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

Editor’s Note Standing with my toes in the warm sand, I watched my fouryear-old daughter Violet coax out string on a small, orange kite.

We were staying with my parents, brother, and his family at a little vacation house on the lakeside of Door County for a few days this summer.

There was talk of going into Baileys Harbor or Fish Creek for some sightseeing, or maybe taking a trip up to Sister Bay for lunch at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant (the place with the goats on the roof ). But none of us could muster the willpower to leave the beach.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the water really was a hundred kinds of blue. A warm wind carrying that lake smell kept the kite aloft— and kept my feet firmly planted. I had a rare moment of feeling no obligation other than, well, the moment. This is what I am doing today, I thought.

Violet walked a little closer to the water’s edge, where big waves stripped away the sand to reveal smooth pebbles of many shapes and sizes. She let out a bit more string and I made a reach for the kite handle, for her, so close to the churning waters.

“Dad, I can do it myself,” she said, pulling the handle away from me.

She let out a bit more string and wiggled her toes in the surf.

As I took a step back from her, I looked north along the shoreline at a nearby cluster of trees and chewed my lip. “Honey, why don’t you reel it in a bit, huh? Or maybe we should fly the kite over here?” pointing away from the trees—and from the water’s edge.

She smiled, shook her head as if to say I’m just fine where I am thank you, reveling in her capacity for testing limits of all kinds. I laughed and picked up a few of those stones, which were perfect for skipping.

In this issue of the magazine, you’ll find articles and essays about people across the state who test limits and take chances. In doing so, they are creating new scientific discoveries, inspiring art, and captivating experiences that are improving life in Wisconsin.

I hope you enjoy reading about them. Perhaps this issue will inspire you to consider the moment, to let out the string a bit and see what happens.

TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Patricia Brady Jane Elder Arjun Sanga Tim Size Linda Ware

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

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Stephanie Trenchard and Jeremy Popelka of Popelka Trenchard Glass in Sturgeon Bay. Photo by Mike Roemer/roemerphoto.com.

FALL 2017

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CONTENTS 04 From the Director 05 Letters 07 Happenings Wisconsin Table Jeremy Popelka

10 Dining on the Rails

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Brenda K. Bredahl

Discovery

14 Salvation through Fermentation

Krista Eastman

Photo Essay

20 Let’s Do Lunch

Carl Corey

Profile

28 Dancing to Hot Glass

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Alyssa Skiba

36

Studio Indigo Photography

VOLUME 63 · NUMBER 4 FALL 2017

Lois Bielefeld James Runde

14 @ the Watrous Gallery

36 Writing in Stone: Memory, History,

and the Life of a Community

Judith Woodburn

Fiction

44 The Hardest Part 2nd Place Contest Winner

Jeff Esterholm

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

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

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

Copyright © 2017 by the Wisconsin 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.

Poetry

52 Honorable Mention poems

from our 2017 Poetry Contest

Syvia Cavanaugh, Thomas J. Erickson, Elisabeth Harrahy, and Shoshauna Shy

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor JEAN LANG copy editor

Book Review

JODY CLOWES arts editor

MAX WITYNSKI editorial assistant

56 Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems,

by Margaret Rozga

Mark Zimmermann

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

A magazine by and for Wisconsin Become an Academy member and get the best of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture delivered to your door.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/membership.

facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/Watrous Gallery

From the Director

I

f you live in a flood-prone area, you may be familiar with a term like 500-year flood, which is a description engineers, planners, and emergency agencies use to predict the likelihood, frequency, and scale of flooding events. A 500-year flood, which has a .2% chance of happening any year, would be expected to be large and significant. As Hurricane Harvey descended on southeast Texas, UW–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center, one of the world’s leading centers on weather and satellite information, described the flooding as a 1,000-year flood, which is, well, unprecedented in American history. And then, on its heels came one of the largest hurricanes ever observed by humans.

How do we know these are extraordinary historical events?

Because we have data that tells us so.

Here in Wisconsin we’ve experienced multiple floods over the last few decades, many at the 500-year scale. These recurring floods, often in the same areas, tell us that perhaps the conditions that influence how and when these areas flood are changing. What this observation also tells us is that we may need to adjust our assumptions and projections.

It turns out that our understanding of how things “are” or “should be” is shifting, and rapidly. As a changing climate increases the scale and frequency of extreme storms, it looks like we’re going to need a bigger scale. But if in creating a new scale we throw out the original baseline, we will lose the critical perspective of just how rapid

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and significant these changes are. From the standpoints of human health and safety, economics, and environmental protection, understanding our baseline is extremely important.

Earlier this year there were forecasts about the scale of predicted dead zones in Green Bay and Lake Erie. While it is good to have this information, these predictions also trouble me because they remind me that algal blooms, fish kills, and beach closures are now part of normal life in the Great Lakes region. “Normal,” however, should not be confused with “acceptable.”

Humans manage change in many ways, and one is to define a new normal when the old one seems to no longer fit. But when we normalize new conditions and don’t consider the cause or consequence of change, we blind ourselves to the capacity to learn, respond, and adapt.

We can’t all personally experience all the important changes happening in our world. Moreover, the “sample of one” (our own experience and perspective) is clearly not sufficient to understand global and ecosystem-scale change. This is where science comes in.

Thousands of data points from consistent monitoring and a thorough understanding of the baseline by which we track change can help us see the bigger picture. Science can help us to better understand change and navigate it wisely. Measuring change can provide insights that can help us determine whether changed conditions are indeed acceptable as “the new normal,” and, if they are, what the impact might be of normalizing these changes.

Science enables us to see trends that are larger than our personal experience. With this bigger picture we can identify risks and opportunities to society and, in many cases, also to specific communities and individuals.

That is, if we’re willing to see and accept what the bigger picture shows us.

Jane Elder, Director

Member News

NEWS for MEMBERS NEW AMERICAN DREAM SERIES Thanks to broadcast support from WisconsinEye, this season members and friends from around the state (and the world) will participate in our American Dream in Wisconsin series. Join us in person, or online, as we explore how changes in public education, rural life, and the immigrant experience are shaping our hopes and dreams for the future. For information about registration and how to watch, visit wisconsinacademy.org/americandreamWI. ANNUAL FALL FUND DRIVE As an independent nonprofit, the Wisconsin Academy relies on the generosity of our donors and members to help move our mission forward. Before the end of the year, please consider a tax-deductible gift to support our programs. Your gift not only supports our current work, like the American Dream in Wisconsin series, but also helps us plan for future programs and exhibitions.

Don’t wait, make your gift online today at wisconsinacademy.org/donate. Thank you!

2017 OPEN HOUSE M a r k yo u r c a l e n d a r s fo r We d n e s d ay, December 6, for our open house celebration.

Join us for conversation, wassail, and a toast to a year of remarkable programs and publications. Details will be available soon on our website, and all members should expect an invitation in the mail.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK If you don’t already, you can keep up-todate with the Academy at facebook.com/ wisconsinacademy. By following us, you will also receive notifications of our live-stream American Dream in Wisconsin series talks.

Letters Terese Agnew’s Writing in Stone installation at the James Watrous Gallery brings great life to the history of Wisconsin, and at such an important time. We can take much pride in how our state has provided leadership on issues ranging from environmental stewardship to civil and Native American rights. Most specially, this dynamic and interactive experience helps to make the connections across seemingly disparate concerns. We need to celebrate the interrelationships that make us whole as individuals and as a society.

Hats-off to Terese and her collaborators for this extraordinary effort!

John Greenler, Stoughton

Thank you for writing an excellent post for your Climate & Energy blog (“Toward Cleaner Power in Wisconsin,” posted September 15, 2017), which is so relevant in our current world of hurricanes. Your emphasis on reducing carbon emissions is so clear and important to get us all thinking on the same page. Still, we need to go beyond natural gas, and, as solar/wind are only intermittent sources, we need to keep our minds open.

Richard Steeves, Madison

I have now finally read the Spring 2017 issue of the magazine and think it is a very fine edition. You are doing a special job, and it get better and better as time goes on! The format of this edition seems different and very appealing to readers. I look forward to the next edition, as I believe it will have the prize-winning story from your contest in it. My book group at Middleton Glen is especially interested in this story. Best wishes and congrats to you.

Ann Peckham, Middleton

KEEP-IN-TOUCH If you have questions about your membership or would like to leave a comment, e-mail members@wisconsinacademy.org or call (608) 263-1692. We’d love to hear from you.

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Happenings

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN A series by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

How do we define life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Wisconsin today?

The American Dream in Wisconsin is a series of public talks presented by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters at Overture Center for the Arts and online through Facebook Live with broadcast support by WisconsinEye. We invite you to join us in a year-long exploration of how changes in public education, rural life, and the immigrant experience are shaping our hopes and dreams for the future.

10/17/17 Cultivating the Dream Michael Bell, Center for Integrated

Agricultural Systems Sarah Lloyd, Wisconsin Farmers Union

11/4/17 Perspectives on the Dream Terese Agnew, artist

2/27/18 Healthcare Access & Reform

Patty Loew, journalist & author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin Jesus Salas, founder of Obreros Unidos

Donna Friedsam, UW–Madison Population Health Institute Greg Nycz, Marshfield Family Health Center Lisa Peyton-Caire, The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness

3/20/18 The Pursuit of Happiness

Richard Davidson, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

4/10/18 Dreams of the Next Generation

Information and advance online registration: wisconsinacademy.org/americandreamWI

Michael Johnson, Boys & Girls Club of Dane County

WATCH AND FOLLOW THIS SERIES AT:

Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following series sponsors:

American Family Insurance–DreamBank • Isthmus Publishing • Quarles & Brady University Research Park • UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies TrustPoint • Broadcast support provided by WisconsinEye

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#AmericanDreamWI

Happenings

City as Living Laboratory

Construction on Watermarks begins in 2018 with several striking focal points, including a light sculpture on the 350-foot smokestack at the Jones Island Water Reclamation Facility. Located just south of downtown and visible from much of the city, the smokestack will become the project’s central beacon, glowing blue in the night. When rain is forecast, the smokestack will glow red, reminding community members to restrict water use and thereby help the city avoid storm sewer overflows that can pollute Lake Michigan and surrounding beaches.

A secondary series of up to twenty human-scaled sculptural markers called focal points will be installed at sites throughout the Inner Harbor District, Walker’s Point, and Walker Square neighborhoods. Developed by schools, community groups, and local agencies in partnership with artists and designers, these focal points will provide a shared visual language for the project as well as water stories and information that can be accessed through a downloadable Watermarks app.

According to Miss, Watermarks is meant “to increase water IQ of citizens” by creating “place-based experiences” that make the story of water come alive. A large group of project partners and funders, including the Haggerty Museum of Art (Marquette University), Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, Milwaukee Arts Board, and others, believe that people who see the markers will feel a greater sense of responsibility for—and understanding of—how water quality is connected to everyday choices we make.

Me

by

Imagine a Milwaukee city skyline that not only lets you know when it will rain, but also reminds you to conserve water when it does.

Watermarks: An Atlas of Water and the City of Milwaukee is a new project that proposes to do just this by using art and large-scale installation to inform and engage Milwaukeeans in city water management.

Environmental artist and Watermarks designer Mary Miss says the project aims to highlight the community’s reliance on water by collaboratively developing and implementing an urban-scaled atlas of sculptural markers that call out Milwaukee’s “water story.” While the first tier of markers will be located in Milwaukee’s Inner Harbor, at the confluence of Milwaukee’s three rivers, and on the Lake Michigan shoreline, Miss says the project will expand organically over time and ripple throughout the city.

lina Mara

P R OJ E CT

Ph

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BOOK Janesville: An American Story, by veteran Washington Post staff writer Amy Goldstein, is a case study of de-industrialization in an American factory town. But Goldstein, unlike many of those who write and opine on this timely subject, is not interested in diagnosing our national ills from on high. Instead, in Janesville she shares the stories of some two-dozen Janesville residents as they adapt to a new economic landscape in the years following the shuttering of the town’s General Motors plant.

“I wanted to operate on two layers,” Goldstein recently told Isthmus, “I wanted to have this intimate quality where you see people’s lives changing. I also wanted to … make clear that the people I was writing about were representative of a larger reality in their community.”

After more than eighty years of production, the Janesville General Motors plant shut down in 2008. Goldstein describes how the closure cast doubt on the future of 4,800 middle-class workers—as well as the economic vitality of the region. As government officials, business leaders, and others scrambled to respond to the closure, thousands of workers were forced to replace lost earnings in a stagnant job market where many of the available jobs paid half the GM wage.

Janesville follows Matt Wopat, a GM employee who saw his family’s savings dwindling along with any hope that GM might re-open the plant. Wopat decided to pursue certification as an electrical lineman at the local Blackhawk Technical College, where dozens of class sections were added in anticipation of the surge of new students.

When anticipated lineman jobs failed to materialize, Wopat dropped out of the program and became a “Janesville Gypsy”; like many former Janesville plant employees, Wopat made weekly trips to and from a GM plant in Fort Wayne, 270 miles from his wife and kids.

Wopat’s story, like the stories of the educators, bankers, politicians, job re-trainers, and others Goldstein captured in her over two years in Janesville, underscores the challenge of supporting a healthy, prosperous working class in modern-day America. As many communities across Wisconsin struggle today to keep or attract good employers, Goldstein’s chronicle of Janesville can be plumbed for encouraging stories of individual resilience and lessons in how communities can pull together to weather hard times. But, as the story also reveals, there is no obvious path forward in the face of complex and unpredictable economic, political, and social forces that lie beyond our control.

The Wisconsin Humanities Council invites you to hear Amy Goldstein talk about Janesville at this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival on November 4 at Madison Central Library. This event is sponsored as part of the WHC’s Working Lives Project.

Jason A. Smith

Dena Worzel

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Happenings

Under the decades-long guidance of director Kathy Kelsey Foley (2014), the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau received in 2017 its first-ever National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The highest recognition awarded by the federal government to museums and libraries for service to their communities, the award acknowledges the Woodson Art Museum’s extraordinary and innovative approach to public service. Perhaps best known for its annual Birds in Art exhibition, which showcases contemporary artistic representations of birds, the museum features diverse exhibitions, a sculpture garden, and other opportunities to explore the natural world through art. “Winning the National Medal is incredibly empowering; this makes us want to do more,” says Foley.

Oxford University Press recently released The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, co-edited by John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication at UW–Madison Dietram Scheufele (2016), Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Kahan of Yale Law School. The handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the current issues and challenges facing science communication, and explores how human biases can affect the ways in which scientific information is processed (and how these biases are exacerbated by the changing media environment).

According to Scheufele, “the handbook brings together some of the very best social scientists whose work helps us approach science communication from a truly scientific perspective.”

Kathy Kelsey Foley

Dietram Scheufele

Patty Loew

Laura L. Kiessling

Though we are sad to see them leave, we’re pleased to announce that two Wisconsin Academy Fellows have recently taken new positions in other states.

Author and educator Patty Loew (2016) recently became inaugural director of Northwestern University’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Research Center. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew is an expert in Ojibwe treaty rights, sovereignty, and the role of Native media in communicating indigenous world views. Laura L. Kiessling (2008), the Steenbock Professor of Chemistry and Laurens Anderson Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joined the faculty of the MIT Department of Chemistry. Using ideas and approaches that range from synthetic chemistry to cell biology, Kiessling’s research group at MIT is leading the exploration of how the carbohydrate coatings of cells are assembled, how they are recognized, and how they function.

Academy Fellows are the best and brightest our state has to offer. Learn more about the Fellows award at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

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ArtStart Rhinelander

ACAD EMY FELLOWS

CO M M U N ITY In 1964, arts education pioneer Robert E. Gard founded the weeklong School of the Arts program in Rhinelander. Beginning with fifty students and six writing instructors, the School of the Arts grew in scope and vision, leveraging the resources of UW–Madison to create a supportive learning environment for hundreds of regional artists, actors, musicians, and writers.

Due to changes in the state budget and the structure of UW System, the UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies held the last School of the Arts in the summer of 2015, ending a fiftyyear tradition of inspiring and cultivating local artists, projects, and organizations.

A group of locals—business owners and public educators, artists and art lovers—who were inspired by the School of the Arts, decided to create a new program designed to strengthen and sustain the Rhinelander community through cultural events and visual art exhibitions. The group established ArtStart in 2011, and set to work transforming the historic downtown Federal Building into an arts and culture destination.

“Support of the community is a good testament to the strength of an organization,” says ArtStart development director Melinda Childs.

“Often small town arts centers are created by someone with money who wants it. But to be grown in a grass roots way financially, and with sweat equity put into it increases the chance at longevity, because it’s wanted and loved and needed.”

Today, with the support of the Robert E. Gard Foundation and the Division of Continuing Studies, ArtStart is keeping the School of the Arts flame alive through a spectrum of artsbased classes for both children and adults. In addition, ArtStart hosts regular group and solo exhibitions from local and regional artists as well as film screenings, music and dance recitals, and other programs designed to bring the community together through art.

Jason A. Smith

VISIT DREAMBANK for free interactive events and resources that will inspire you to pursue your dreams.

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THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN A series by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

9/15/17 8:53 AM

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN A series by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

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Wisconsin Table

DINING on the

RAILS

BY BRENDA K. BREDAHL

G

reg Vreeland loves trains. “They are big, colorful, and go places, and kids

seem to be genetically programmed to love trains,” says the founder and co-owner of the Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad, located in Trego, a few miles from Spooner in Washburn County.

Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad

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Wisconsin Table

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Wisconsin Table

The couple launched their first excursion train as contractors for the North Shore Scenic Railroad between Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota. When the train took almost 10,000 passengers on the 25-mile trip that first year, they knew they were on to something.

In 1997 the Vreelands leased seven miles of track near Spooner and moved their operation south to the Railroad Memories Museum housed in the former Chicago & North Western Railway Depot.

Known as the “Crossroads of the North,” Spooner became a center of lumbering and railroading when the Omaha Railroad established a hub there in 1882. The railroad fueled Spooner’s economy, employing about half of the town’s population (six hundred people) at the turn of the century. The line was eventually absorbed by the Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul & Omaha Railroad (later becoming the Chicago & North Western Railroad); passenger service to the region stopped in the early 1960s.

Because of the area’s historic relationship with the railroad, the Vreelands decided in 2013 to build the depot of their dreams in Spooner. Today, their Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad offers freight service five days a week—but freight is not their only focus.

They offer up to three-hour passenger trips with a variety of food service as well as an overnight bed-and-breakfast ride.

Great Northern Wisconsin Railroad

T

Railroading is a family affair for Greg, Mardell, and Alexander Vreeland.

Their Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad is one of the few family-owned heritage railroad operations in the county.

Vreeland grew up in the rail-heavy port of Superior. A firstgeneration railroader with no relatives in the business, Vreeland says he would spend hours watching the Soo Line trains switch cars and tracks when he visited his grandparents in Cameron, just south of Rice Lake. At age twelve he become a junior transportation club member of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth, and Vreeland continued working as a weekend tour guide and mechanical restorer for the museum into his twenties.

In 1992, Vreeland met his wife, Mardell, whose shared interest in railroading created a match made in depot heaven. Almost immediately after the wedding, the couple established the Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad in hopes of creating a freight line. They set to work purchasing and repairing equipment, and quickly realized that they wanted to do more than just move cargo.

“Passenger trains are my roots, and it was easy to shift focus … [to] offering passenger service,” says Vreeland.

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he once-seasonal railroad today employs 25 people and serves meals to around 15,000 guests each year. People come from miles around to enjoy everything from pizza to a formal, five-course dinner to bed-and-breakfast in restored cars dating from 1912 to 1950.

The pizza excursions, serving pies from Tony’s Riverside in Spooner, are popular with families, as are Santa Pizza trains and three-hour trips for holidays such as Mother’s Day. For those desiring a shorter vintage train experience, a 45-minute jaunt in the “Doodlebug,” a restored 1913 self-propelled, trolley-type car retrofitted with tables and chairs, offers passengers a 360-view as they chug along.

Most people opt for the dinner ride. Dinner guests arrive before the 6:00 pm boarding time. Conductor Lance Denotter reviews the passenger log for each of the eight cars and then the whistle blows long and loud, signaling final departure. The train is powered by No. 423, a Chicago & North Western F7 diesel locomotive painted in the line’s familiar green and orange and expertly piloted by engineer Lynton Brooks, who makes the weekly drive from International Falls to work on the train.

While the train chugs along at a pleasant speed, passengers spy long-needled white pines that once fueled the region’s economic growth in the 1800s. Astonishingly abundant wildflowers, whitetailed deer, and wild turkeys make for exciting late summer viewing from linen-covered dining tables. “Bald eagles and the occasional bear are not uncommon sightings,” notes Beverly Jaskolski, a waitress and occasional night porter for overnight train guests.

Abandoned telegraph poles with thick glass insulators run along the forested track, which at one point reveals an interesting junkyard crop of vintage cars. ATV riders, making use of the Wild Rivers State Trail, wave as they pass by. The train rolls by farmland

Anthony Bredahl

Photo Credit

Wisconsin Table

Dinner and bed-and-breakfast rides on the Great Northern Wisconsin Railroad offer sweeping views of the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway.

as well as the backyards of residents living in small towns such as Trego and Earl.

On the slow ride north, passengers nosh on seafood appetizers, green salads, bread, and bowls of wild rice soup, a local specialty.

Entrées of steak, chicken kiev, pork ribs, wood-plank salmon, and cheese ravioli are all prepared on board by chef Paul Zirkle in the small kitchen car.

“In the early years, food was catered from local restaurants,” says Vreeland. “Unfortunately, quality was not always the best because the food was cooked ahead of time. … The quality improved greatly when we began cooking on board the train.”

Before the waitress delivers the entrées, the conductor urges passengers to stretch their legs and slip between the cars to take photos at the trip’s apex: Veazie Springs on the Namekagon River, which is part of the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway. This stunning view of the river and its tributary is accessible only by train, canoe, or kayak. The end-of-the-line stop provides diners with peaceful surroundings and an incredible vista from the high perch the train affords.

As she pours the after-dinner coffee, Beverly shares a little of the area’s celebrated logging history. “There was once an earthen dam that would open to let the logs through to the Namekagon River,” she says. “You’ll see kayakers and canoes on the Namekagon from this vantage point.” Sure enough, a kayaker emerges among tall grasses, seemingly oblivious to the train as he traverses the still river.

After the dinner train makes its reverse trip to the depot, diners disembark, and those staying overnight in the bed-and-breakfast train can step outside and enjoy the starlit northern sky from the depot’s patio, which is appointed with tables, chairs, and a roaring fire. Overnight can be an authentic, if cramped, experience in a

1950s sleeping car with upper and lower bunks, or a larger Pullman car with more spacious mahogany-trimmed staterooms that have private baths and three-quarter sized beds.

“Through the years Mardell and I have traveled the country looking for the right cars to refurbish for our heritage railroad. Each has been chosen for a specific service and then carefully restored so it can be enjoyed for decades to come,” says Vreeland.

“Trains are something that can be a cross-generational experience and an interest that can be passed down,” says Vreeland.

He notes that his son Alexander is cultivating his own passion for trains. Vreeland says with a chuckle that Alexander “is now getting into the passenger cars—and talking with us about how we should decorate new restorations.”

Brenda K. Bredahl holds an MA from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and a BS from UW–River Falls.

Her freelance articles and photographs have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, and online at travelwisconsin.com.

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Discovery

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Discovery

SALVATION through

FERMENTATION

BY KRISTA EASTMAN

Y

easts are single-celled organisms whose voracious appetite for sugar serves us well.

For over ten thousand years, humans have

harnessed the fermentative power of yeast to create beer, wine, cheese, and bread. But yeasts are also critical to the process of generating

Sevie Kenyon /UW–Madison CALS

other important products, including medicines such as penicillin and biofuels such as ethanol.

Petri dishes in the Hittinger lab at UW–Madison grow a multitude of wild yeast species. Undiscovered yeast species and engineered yeast hybrids may hold the key to unlocking the biofuel potential of switchgrass and other biomass crops.

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Discovery

Although not yet a market force, cellulosic biofuels, or fuels made from grasses and wood, are routinely factored into future climate mitigation scenarios because of their potential to displace petroleum use and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Dedicated bioenergy crops can also be grown on non-agricultural land, require less fertilizer than annual crops such as corn, and boost biodiversity. Ultimately, GLBRC researchers hope to find ways of growing sustainable biomass and converting it to biofuels and bio-products that provide cost-competitive alternatives to petroleum-derived fuels and chemicals.

Getting there, however, will depend on a number of scientific advancements, including finding new ways to harness the power and potential of yeast.

UNTAPPED POTENTIAL OF YEAST DIVERSITY The idea of improving yeast function for industrial purposes is not new. Researchers around the world have engineered yeast strains to increase the efficiency with which they ferment, and the fermented food and biofuel industries all rely on such improved strains. But approaches to this efficiency challenge are also multiplying and growing in sophistication.

James Runde

Genetically closer to animals than plants, yeasts are living microorganisms that feed on sugar. When yeasts metabolize sugar, they convert it into other compounds. In the case of biofuels, yeasts convert the simple sugars found in plant biomass into ethanol, isobutanol, or other specialty fuels. The efficiency with which a yeast species converts sugar affects the yield of any fermented food or fuel product. As such, yeast performance can be the deciding factor in whether or not a particular product is economically viable.

Corn-based ethanol, which is developed by combining a highefficiency yeast with sugar-rich corn, is one example of a popular product that offers a high return on investment (though, corn production is also heavily subsidized by the U.S. government).

Currently, as much as 97% of gasoline sold in the U.S. contains ethanol.

Producing economically viable biofuels from biomass other than corn, however, is more complicated. Many biofuels researchers, including those at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, are now focused on making biofuels from low-input crops such as switchgrass and poplar. These dedicated bioenergy crops, no portion of which are used for food, avoid the conflicts that arise from growing food crops to produce fuel.

Co-lab manager Russell Wrobel (l) and principal investigator Chris Todd Hittinger (r) study the diversity and evolution of yeast metabolism. By understanding how and what different yeast species can ferment, as well as how evolution has shaped those capabilities, the Hittinger Lab is gaining knowledge that will help them engineer yeast that can better meet our energy needs.

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Discovery

NEW BREWS, BETTER BIOFUELS Not surprisingly, Hittinger’s hybridization process gained the interest of Wisconsin beer brewers. Fermentation science graduate student Kara Hulce, working with food science professor James Steele, began brewing with the yeast hybrids in UW–Madison’s fermentation lab back in 2016.

A certified beer judge and expert in fermentation, Hulce ferments her beer in a pilot lab donated by Miller Coors using the same product development scale that industrial brewers use. She monitors small fermentations of hybrids and parental strains of yeast at two different temperatures (lager temperature of 100 degrees Celsius and ale temperature of 200 degrees), looking for useful characteristics and possible industry applications. Currently, she is working with four of Hittinger’s new hybrids in the lab, one of which

Photo Credit

While the number of known yeast species currently lands somewhere above one thousand, the food and biofuel industries have historically relied on only a handful. What drives the research of Chris Todd Hittinger, UW–Madison professor of genetics and GLBRC yeast expert, is a tantalizing sense of the untapped potential of the rich variations in yeast species created over hundreds of millions of years. Diversifying the strains of yeast we use could mean new and different “brews,” including brand new flavors for food and faster, more efficient processes for making biofuels.

In addition to locating and studying wild species of yeast, Hittinger and his team are exploring the potential of crossing two different yeast species to produce hybrids with new and useful characteristics. In previous research, Hittinger discovered that hybridized yeast played a significant role in the success of beer brewing. Around five hundred years ago, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisae accidentally crossed with Saccharomyces eubayanus.

The emerging hybrid had the newfound ability to ferment in cold temperatures, which meant it could thrive in European caves and cellars.

This chance hybridization is the reason we have lager beers today. As Hittinger notes, “only about 5% of the beer market is from Saccharomyces cerevisae; the other 95% is from these interspecies hybrids.”

This discovery caused Hittinger to wonder if similar hybridizations couldn’t find application in both the food and biofuels industries, or if other “industrial advantages might be gained from similarly adding genes from a very different yeast species.” Since hybridizations such as the one giving rise to lager beer have only a one in a billion chance of happening in nature, Hittinger needed to develop his own means of encouraging hybridization between two genetically different yeasts.

With funding from Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and the National Science Foundation, Hittinger came up with a quick and efficient way to express the naturally occurring yeast proteins that enable reproduction and to coax two yeasts to reproduce.

“Within a week, you can generate a large number of hybrids of whatever two species you want, creating forms never seen before,” says Hittinger.

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a native warm-season grass that is well suited to marginal cropland. Because it requires little fertilizer and provides a range of ecological benefits to the landscape, switchgrass has become a leading candidate in the search for sustainable biomass energy crops.

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James Runde

Discovery

Fermentation science graduate student Kara Hulce works with beer samples in the fermentation lab in UW–Madison’s Babcock Hall.

contains a strain of Saccharomyces eubayanus discovered in the soils of Sheboygan.

“I try to see how these strains could work in a brewing setting,” Hulce says, “how quickly the yeast will come out of a solution, how it uptakes sugars, and then—a big thing—flavor.” As for taste, Hulce says that so far the early brews are spicier than you’d expect from a classic lager strain.

Hulce’s research could help accelerate the rate at which Hittinger’s technique results in new commercial products, but it’s also a good example of the way in which a single university technology can potentially have an impact on multiple industries.

Indeed, Hittinger’s hybrid yeasts are bringing researchers closer to cracking the code of cellulosic biofuels. A study published in early 2017 details how Hittinger and his team created vigorous yeast hybrids that exhibited improvements in stress tolerance, sugar consumption, and biofuel yield—all traits of interest to the biofuels industry.

To find the right combination of traits, the team first studied a diverse collection of wild yeast strains and then tested them to see which ones grew the best under conditions used for making biofuels. Once they had identified the top four strains, they crossed each of the wild strains with two industrial strains of engineered Saccharomyces cerevisae.

To determine whether the newly generated hybrids could be improved by an accelerated version of natural selection called “adaptive evolution,” the scientists then exposed six hearty hybrids to harsh industrial conditions, requiring them to retain tolerance to toxins and ethanol, and forcing them toward starvation if they did not consume xylose, a difficult-to-ferment plant sugar.

The hybrids grew, multiplied, and, most importantly, mutated, a sign they were not just surviving but also adapting to their harsh conditions. Hittinger’s team now believes that by combining hybridization and adaptive evolution, they can zero in on the genetic code associated with desired traits.

“With even more generations and different starting points, we hope to know even more about which yeast adaptations will benefit biofuels,” says Hittinger. “With this research, we can take what we now know about yeast hybridization and diversity and apply it directly to the challenges facing us all.”

Find the latest innovations and discoveries that are fueling a sustainable future at wisconsinacademy.org/sustainability.

Krista Eastman is a writer and editor at the Wisconsin Energy Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also an essayist, with writings appearing in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review (KROnline), New Letters, Witness, and other journals.

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WHERE

INFINITE

POTENTIAL MEETS

UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN – MADISON, WE ARE BOUNDLESS. WISC.EDU

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#ONWISCONSIN

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Photo Essay

LET’S DO LUNCH PHOTOGRAPHS BY CARL COREY Meals on Wheels annually delivers 218 million meals to 2.4 million Americans who are unable to purchase or prepare their own meals.

Research shows that home-delivered meal programs significantly improve diet quality, increase nutrient intake, reduce food insecurity, and improve quality-of-life among recipients. The Meals on Wheels program also reduces government expenditures by reducing the need of recipients to use hospitals, nursing homes, or other expensive community-based services.

Many of the people across the country who benefit from Meals on Wheels are elderly, and many of the volunteers who deliver meals are also elderly but ablebodied and able to drive automobiles. By bringing together people in need with someone who cares enough to volunteer his or her time, the Meals on Wheels program supplies both physical and emotional sustenance for participants.

Carl Corey, 2017

Names and locations of Meals on Wheels volunteers and recipients were purposely omitted for this photo essay.

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Photo Essay

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Photo Essay

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Photo Essay

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Photo Essay

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Section

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Section

Exhibited widely in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad, Carl Corey’s work has also been featured in several of photography’s most prestigious periodicals. Corey is the recipient of more than 100 awards from the advertising, publishing, and photography communities, and his photographs have been the subject of several books, including For Love and Money: A Portrait of the Family Business (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014).

See more incredible photography by photographers from across the state at wisconsinacademy.org/photography.

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Mike Roemer/roemerphoto.com

Profile

Dancing to

HOT GLASS

BY ALYSSA SKIBA

T

he inviting orange glow emanating from the back of the Popelka Trenchard Glass studio belies the fury

that lies within the 2,000-degree furnace: three hundred pounds of molten soda-lime glass.

While the front of the studio is lined with luminous bowls and vases, lamps featuring swirls of color, and charming figurines encased in glass, the back of Popelka Trenchard Glass looks like an industrial forge. An iron casting ladle, steel blowpipes, and oversize shears rest just steps away from the work stations where Sturgeon Bay artists Jeremy Popelka and Stephanie Trenchard transform molten glass into sometimes practical, sometimes whimsical works of art.

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Profile

“ From the outside it looks a little bit chaotic sometimes, and you wonder how we manage to not hurt each other,” says Jeremy. “But, in reality, it’s just like a dance we’ve done every day for 25 years.”

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Working with hot glass is a delicate and sometimes dangerous endeavor. But this husband-and-wife team, whose success in the studio depends on their ability to move quickly among tight spaces with little physical protection, has an almost innate knowledge of each other’s next move.

“From the outside it looks a little bit chaotic sometimes, and you wonder how we manage to not hurt each other,” says Jeremy. “But, in reality, it’s just like a dance we’ve done every day for 25 years.”

Twenty of these years have been spent pushing the boundaries of glass artistry in a studio-gallery located in Sturgeon Bay’s historic downtown. Working from the gateway to Door County, Jeremy has gained a global following with his kaleidoscopic glass vessels; while Stephanie has racked up award after award for her painterly sandcast sculptures.

Though the labels that accompany the works of art displayed on the sunlit shelves of their gallery suggest each piece is a solo endeavor, collaboration lies at the heart of Popelka Trenchard Glass.

A thirty-year veteran of the glass art world, Jeremy specializes in glassblowing, cast glass, and murrini, which is considered among the most labor intensive and difficult of all glass methods. Developed in the Middle East more than 4,000 years ago and revived by Venetian glass artists in the 16th century, the murrini style of glass art is identifiable by its fluid, multi-colored patterns.

The murrini process begins with layering molten glass colors on a steel rod, stretching that glass into a four- to five-foot-long cane, and cutting that cane into half-inch slices, also known as murrini.

After repeating the process to create rods of varying designs, up to five hundred murrini slices are assembled into complex patterns on a flat surface.

“The murrini slices end up being the patterns in the vessels,” explains Jeremy. “So they have to get fused together and then clear glass is added over, … and then it gets blown out.” The “blown out” to which Jeremy refers, involves an assistant blowing on the end of a long, metal tube inserted into the end of the molten glass in order to get the vessel to expand to just the right proportions.

In any hot glass process, the master craftsman (in glass terms, the “gaffer”) must rely on an assistant to supply tools, open furnace and kiln doors, protect the gaffer’s arms from the heat, keep the work-inprogress pliable, and, of course, blow out the glass.

For practiced glass artists like Jeremy and Stephanie, the dance of studio work is second nature. “We know how pieces are made, different techniques. Unless you’re doing something really exotic, you can go into a different place and be a pretty functional assistant right away,” says Jeremy, noting that, “outside of a few tweaks that each artist has, there’s a foundation of dance steps that everybody knows.”

For Stephanie, these dance steps—those of the assistant, and those of the gaffer—were learned slowly over two decades. A painter by training, she took just two classes in hot glass during her undergraduate studies at Illinois State University where she met Jeremy, an art major focusing on glass, in the early 1980s.

They married in 1987 and spent the next decade pursuing their individual artistic endeavors in California—Jeremy in hot glass and Stephanie in textile design. After years honing their crafts on the West Coast, the couple made their way to Door County, drawn to the slower pace of life and proximity to family.

Profile

Jeremy and Stephanie make a murrini bowl. “The dance is highly choreographed, with the participants well aware of the steps involved and each other’s slight variations and takes on the process,” says Jeremy. “With that said, improvisation, spontaneous action, and the accommodation of mistakes are critical components, depending on the demands of a particular piece and which side of the bed you got up on.” Photos by Mike Roemer/roemerphoto.com.

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Jeremy Popelka

Jeremy Popelka

Profile

Left: Popelka Landscape Tapestry Bowl, 2015. Handblown glass, 8 x 11 x 11 inches.

Right: Popelka Murrini Landscape, 2015. Handblown glass, 16 x 11 x 4 inches.

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“It was kind of a restart,” recalls Jeremy. “California was an expensive place … and I thought, well, this is a place where we can actually be artists, start over again. I could build a studio and we could try to make it happen.”

With support of a small startup loan and incubator space furnished by the Door County Economic Development Corporation (DCEDC), the studio dream slowly became a reality. On a shoestring budget and with tools borrowed from Stephanie’s father, the couple built a bare-bones studio in the DCEDC warehouse in 1997 and launched Popelka Trenchard Glass.

While the two didn’t yet have gallery representation, they did have access to a fork lift and loading dock, as well as invaluable business support services, thanks to the DCEDC. The establishment of a new art studio also marked the earliest professional collaboration between Jeremy and Stephanie, who saw their shared investment as reason enough for Stephanie to try her hand with glass.

By the time Popelka Trenchard Glass relocated to its current space on 2nd Avenue in 2002, Stephanie was not only working in glass but inventing and perfecting a technique that incorporated sculpture, painting, and sand casting.

“I saw immediately we had something we had never seen anyone else do,” says Stephanie.

Mike Roemer/roemerphoto.com

Profile

The sand-casting process uses molten glass poured directly into a pre-formed mold made from compacted sand. Stephanie’s approach amplifies this process by taking small, glass-sculpted objects and figures painted with high-fire enamel and embedding them into molten glass. She describes the resulting works as “stilllife paintings in glass.”

Stephanie’s sand-cast works met with immediate success at exhibitions in the Midwest, inspiring the couple to bring more of their individual art histories, personalities, and interests to the table in the spirit of collaboration.

“Stephanie has a lot of wisdom and history that is not within the glass field, … and I knew that wisdom would make for a more dynamic place,” says Jeremy, adding, “we constantly need each other’s feedback—for better or worse—about what comes out of the kiln.”

A

s their artwork gained critical attention and garnered exhibits in increasingly larger venues, from the SOFA (Sculpture Objects Functional Art and Design) Fair in Chicago to the International Exhibition of Glass in Japan, Jeremy and Stephanie began accepting requests for classes and workshops. Since developing in

2008 a studio schedule that balances teaching and practicing, the duo has guided more than 350 students in glass blowing and casting techniques.

“Jeremy and I have a really shared approach of generosity of information with people,” says Stephanie. “We don’t withhold techniques or style. When students come in, we share it.”

In recent years, that generosity has taken the artists beyond their little corner of Wisconsin to share their craft at the nation’s glass centers, including New York’s Corning Museum of Glass. But perhaps their most significant contribution to the international hot glass community happened at a bottle-making facility 8,000 miles away from home.

The Bangkok Glass Studio, Thailand’s first learning center for hot glass, was established in 2017 by Bangkok Glass Public Company Limited under Jeremy and Stephanie’s guidance. Unlike any of their other experiences, this one began with the discovery of an intriguing e-mail in their spam filter asking, “What is your availability to come and teach glass artists in Thailand? To start a glass-blowing studio.”

Stephanie says they were extremely skeptical this was a legitimate offer.

But the man behind the e-mail was a top executive of Bangkok Glass Company, a mega-manufacturer of glass and packaging

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Jeremy Popelka

Jeremy Popelka

Profile

Above: Trenchard, Bird House, 2014. Sand cast glass with inclusions, 14 x 15 x 3.75 inches.

Below: Popelka, Key, 2014. Assembled sand cast glass, 16 x 22 x 4.5 inches.

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Profile

for these student scholarship fundraising events!

Music of the Saturday, November 18 Contact the Aber Suzuki Center

Photo Credit

products throughout Asia. With six manufacturing plants and a growing line of glass products, the company’s president was looking to find new ways to use their existing facility and material to gain further prestige in the glass world. Thus the idea for a hot glass studio was born.

But, given its novelty in Thailand, the studio would need to serve first and foremost as a training center in hot glass design and technique. With no immediate connections to the art glass world, Bangkok Glass Company executives set out to find artists with an intimate knowledge of hot glass and a willingness to share that knowledge.

Their search led them to the Popelka Trenchard Glass website, where their initial contact led to the exchange of ideas and proposals. Bangkok Glass Company said they had assembled a group of employees and graduate art students from the neighboring Silpakorn University who were eager to learn. Jeremy and Stephanie decided to take a “leap of faith” and bring their medium into uncharted territory.

“To go to a place that has no history [in art glass], it’s a heavy responsibility,” Jeremy says. “I felt the weight of that, but it never was consuming. I felt up to the challenge.”

For a six-week period beginning in January 2017, Jeremy and Stephanie taught Thai students the fundamentals of glass blowing and hot glass studio work. At times the experience pushed the couple beyond the boundaries of their craft as they learned to adapt to the stifling heat of the studio and the limited English of their students. Visual cues and chalkboard translations bridged the language barrier, and work with the tools and techniques became their sign language, as they taught their students the required steps for the dance.

When the couple returned to Thailand in April 2017 as honored guests of Bangkok Glass Studio for the grand opening, they did so with a newfound appreciation for the simple mix of sand, soda ash, and limestone that changed the course of their lives. Even today, Bangkok Glass Studio students reach out to Jeremy and Stephanie, requesting video chats and e-mailing photos of their own journeys in the hot glass world.

“You realize there are other possibilities of things that you can do to broaden your mission,” Jeremy says. “The main thing Thailand did for me personally was give me permission to dream a little bit. It makes me want to be more ambitious with what we do in the future.”

www.uwsp.edu/suzuki

Saturday, February 3, 2018 www.artsbash.com

SOIRÉE

MUSICALE Friday, April 27, 2018

www.uwsp.edu/music

Visit www.uwsp.edu/cofac

to learn more about the 2017-18 College of Fine Arts and Communication events Alyssa Skiba is the Arts, Entertainment & Literature Editor with the Peninsula Pulse newspaper and Door County Living magazine. She lives in Ephraim.

1800 Portage Street, Stevens Point, Wis.

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@ Watrous Gallery

WRITING IN STONE Memory, History, and the Life of a Community

BY JUDITH WOODBURN

P

erched on a hilltop in LaFarge, Star Cemetery is just across the road

from artist Terese Agnew’s house. Over the past decade, Agnew has visited the tiny cemetery almost daily on her walks, finding inspiration in its sweeping views of the Kickapoo River Valley. But in 2011, as politics in the state began to shift, Agnew found herself worrying during her walks.

A few of the many collaborators who contributed to Writing in Stone: Cathy Danielson Rudder, Diane Dahl, Terese Agnew, and Trudy Sensat.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Studio Indigo Photography

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@ Watrous Gallery

Studio Indigo Photography

“Policy changes were coming down from the Capitol seemingly without historical consideration, or a long-term view of the future,” says Agnew.

“Some people felt this was fine, as long as they saw their taxes go down. But many people felt the traditions of the state were under siege.”

As political debate intensified across the state and became increasingly acrimonious, Agnew recalls, “people reacted emotionally, and it hurt relationships.”

Known for large-scale public installations and intricately detailed fiber works that embrace environmental and social justice themes, Agnew understands the political and cultural power of art.

Made up of 30,000 individual clothing labels over the course of two years, her large-scale Portrait of a Textile Worker (2005) drew considerable public attention to the plight of the millions of low-wage sweatshop workers who make our clothing.

Distressed by the fraying fabric of her state and community, Agnew wondered how she could help pull people together and bring wisdom to the debate.

She found her answer in Star Cemetery’s timeworn headstones. Reading the fading epitaphs of the town’s early settlers, Agnew thought about the importance of memory and history in the life of a community. Why, she wondered, do we create monuments only for death and war?

With a new, large-scale installation titled Writing in Stone, Agnew seeks to create monuments not to death or war but to transformative ideas and events from Wisconsin’s past. “We seem most to want to honor conflict—violent conflict,” she says, pointing to the current political and cultural tempest surrounding Civil War monuments as one example. “[But] there are so many other ways that human beings over time have struggled to resolve problems, and they deserve a place in our memory that’s bigger than the place they’ve been granted.”

Now on view at the James Watrous Gallery, Writing in Stone invites viewers into a garden of monuments that take their visual cues from traditional shapes and motifs found in cemeteries and public places throughout Wisconsin. Each component of the installation—from a tribute to Caroline Quarlls, the first known

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@ Watrous Gallery

African-American to escape slavery through Wisconsin’s Underground Railroad, to a piece honoring the Menominee Forest Keepers, whose stewardship has preserved one of the largest remaining old-growth forests in the world—challenges what we have come to expect from civic monuments.

Although Writing in Stone was not conceived specifically in response to the debate over Civil War monuments, it’s almost as if the installation proposes an alternative (and timely) vision to consider: exemplary moments in our shared history that can draw our communities together rather than enshrine and amplify our differences.

Around the time Agnew began planning Writing in Stone, she was introduced to Tom Thibodeau and Rick Kyte, two professors at the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University who had a deep influence on Writing in Stone. Kyte’s book, Ideas Unite, Issues Divide: Essays on the Ethical Life, “examines contemporary moral struggles in light of our shared commitment to the ideas that bind us all together in shared human experiences.” For Agnew, the book’s theme struck an important chord.

“If we want to move beyond the issues that divide us, it makes sense to revisit the historical leaders and events that still command broad-based esteem,” she says. “It makes sense to look at how and why things are the way they are now, at the best historic examples of ethical choices that shaped this place we call home.”

Wandering among the resulting sculptures evokes the experience of being in a town square or a cemetery—if that cemetery had sound, music, and the occasional moving statue. At the opening of the Watrous exhibit, actor Flora Coker performed as a “living statue” of suffrage and civil rights crusader Belle LaFollette. The installation also includes an audio experience by sound artist Rob Danielson (who happens to be Agnew’s husband) that adds an extra dimension to one of the works.

One of the more than twenty monuments in the installation invites visitors to reflect on the gently curving crop rows that help make Wisconsin’s hilly farmland so productive. Devised by the Civilian Conservation Corps working in the state, the practice of contour farming stems soil erosion and supports the health of working cropland. Vernon County, notes the text on the monument, now has more acres of contour-farmed land than any other area in the nation.

Another Writing in Stone monument offers testament to the various political factions in Wisconsin committed to standing against slavery that went on to establish the national Republican Party. The sculpture, a faithful recreation of the door through which

Agnew thought about the importance of memory and history in the life of a community.

Why, she wondered, do we create monuments only for death and war?

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Studio Indigo Photography

@ Watrous Gallery

the newly minted Republicans passed on the night the party was formed, almost seems to beckon viewers to enter and share in the spirit of purpose and forward thinking that must have suffused that gathering.

Other sculptures pay tribute to Walter Bresette, an Ojibwe leader and advocate for a Seventh Generation amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would obligate lawmakers to consider the impact of legislation on future generations. From within a small grove of sculpted trees, the recorded sound of Bresette’s own soft voice, layered with an audio naturescape created by Danielson, emerges like a whisper in the leaves, urging that strength and truth be tempered by gentleness in confronting the social and moral issues of the day.

Not all the elements of the Writing in Stone installation are memorials to people and ideas of the past. Some, such as the monument honoring a long-term Monarch butterfly habitat restoration project outside Milwaukee, pay tribute to ongoing efforts by people who are very much alive today.

While the subjects of the monuments composed for Writing in Stone are diverse, a common theme unites them. “I was drawn,” Agnew explains, “to people in history who worked harder, more courageously, or simply against the odds to solve the problems of their time. Most of all, I was moved by the people who found another angle, another possibility, outside the bounds of the status quo.”

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Agnew says it was especially daunting to decide what to include in the installation. The task began in earnest with a comprehensive list of recommendations made by Kathy Borkowski, director of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. From these recommendations, Agnew assembled a reading list and invited book groups to read, discuss, and share favorite quotes and moments for the project. She hoped that by reading and responding to these books, “people could begin to remember, learn from, and inspire others with the knowledge our ancestors left us—even before the sculptures were built.”

Research and construction for Writing in Stone spanned more than three years and involved a huge cast of collaborators. (Full disclosure: the writer of this piece was one of them, and participated primarily at the beginning to help launch the project.) Agnew is no stranger to working with large groups; many of her projects have involved teams of artists, craftspeople, organizers, and funders. But Writing in Stone, Agnew says, breaks her own record.

The principal team that physically created the installation includes Diane Dahl, a mixed-media artist whose mural work has been commissioned by Wisconsin businesses; Elliot Meadow, who previously worked creating sets and props in New York City and whose own paintings have been exhibited in local galleries; jewelry-maker and glass artist Peggy Krzyzewski; and puppeteers and display artists Gene and Lynette Lombard. The building team also included carpenters Jim Krenn, David Moynihan, and Jeff Miller,

@ Watrous Gallery

Created by Terese Agnew with a team of artists, writers, and other collaborators, Writing in Stone invokes Wisconsin’s legacy of civic engagement, action, and legislation to further education, civil liberties, and social justice. Photos by Studio Indigo Photography.

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@ Watrous Gallery

SEE THE EXHIBITION

Studio Indigo Photography

WRITING IN STONE

and organizer Julie Hoel. They were backed by a far larger group of historians, writers, and even pie bakers, because Agnew knows that artists, like armies, run on their stomachs.

Constructing the sculptures presented a new set of challenges.

Previously, Agnew used actual stone in her works, such as the gargantuan Rockmen Guardians along the Rock River recreation path in Rockford, Illinois. Another project incorporated an entire grove of tree stumps cast from concrete. But because Writing in Stone was planned as a traveling installation, practical considerations ruled out such heavyweight materials. After exploring other options, Agnew and her team found it worked best to build forms with lumber and foam obtained as factory discards, then coat the forms with a product used for creating movie sets and props. The final step was a series of translucent paint washes by artist Elliot Meadow to create the illusion of lichen, soot, and the passage of time.

Although it is not a monument, one piece from Writing in Stone seems to express most clearly the spirit the team of artists brought to this incredible collaborative project. A two-dimensional banner created specifically for the installation at James Watrous Gallery depicts a Shaker motif common in Wisconsin cemeteries: a heart resting in the palm of a hand. “To me,” says Agnew, “it’s about welcoming others with an open heart, and putting your hands to work at what you believe in.”

Judith Woodburn is a Madison-based freelance writer and editor. Her essays and articles have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times. She’s written several nonfiction books for children, most recently a book on mindfulness: Your Happiest You (American Girl, 2017).

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A COLLABORATIVE INSTALLATION

BY TERESE AGNEW

On view at the James Watrous Gallery

SEPTEMBER 20 – NOVEMBER 5 Join us for these related events:

HALLOWEEN TOUR TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31 5:30–6:30PM ART@NOON TOUR FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3 Thank you to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following exhibition sponsors:

Kickapoo Cultural Exchange

We’ve had issues for 40+ years

Cas Public: Symphonie Dramatique FRI, OCT 20 | 8 PM

An Evening with David Sedaris WED, OCT 25 | 7:30 PM MEDIA PARTNER

SHAWN PETERS

INGRID CHRISTIE

DAMIAN SIQUEIROS

O N S A L E N O W ! | O V E R T U R E .O R G

Gregory Porter

THU, NOV 16 | 7:30 PM SPONSORED BY

MEDIA PARTNER

DANCE SERIES SPONSOR

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DianaThomas / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo

Fiction

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Fiction

THE HARDEST PART

BY JEFF ESTERHOLM

T

he five women, all in their thirties and costumed as pigs in pink cotton onesies,

faces hidden by Petunia Pig masks, trotted in through the back door of the house on the corner of 16th and Marquette and into its dark kitchen. The one who led them through the unlocked door, Joanne Severson, held a finger up to the lips beneath her Petunia snout.

“Shh.” A giggle. Then she called out, “Kids, come here a sec, will you?”

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Fiction

Patrick, Kim, Tom, and Richie, this last, the youngest, a purposeful accident conceived in anger on a humid summer night in a Lake Nebagamon cabin, came on the run. Patrick, the oldest of Joanne’s four, flipped the kitchen switch. The three circular fluorescent tubes that made up the fixture centered on the ceiling flickered to cold brilliance. The shining masks tilted at her children.

She thinks back on that now, years later. Patrick was the one who turned on the light, wasn’t he? He always had. She had to watch that with the other kids. He was the one.

The five women, a bowling team sponsored by Edelstein Brothers, Quality Jewelers and Optometrists, were half in the bag. They grunted and oinked, and then laughed, slapping their pink-cotton knees. The children, the three youngest anyway, with their sleepy grins, were ready to play. But Patrick, Joanne’s Book-of-the-Month-Club edition of In Cold Blood in his hand, index finger tucked in between the pages, marking where he was when interrupted, looked embarrassed for all these ladies, these adults. They were moms and most of them, though not Joanne, did work outside of the home. This was the exception. There was the one who mixed the dough and seasoned the ground beef in the backroom kitchen at Dominic’s Pizza. Another was a Holmgren Clinic nurse who wore a starched white uniform by day, a black stripe across the fold of her white RN cap. And the elementary schoolteacher. She subbed at Roosevelt Elementary, where Patrick went through the sixth grade. All of them were bowlers. He didn’t run, squealing and laughing like his sister and brothers, when the bowling team took off after them with their riotous snorting.

The team numbered five. They had all been her friends. Up to a point, Bonita Weir had been her best friend.

She remembers Bonita grabbing Patrick, who was fourteen, a small fourteen, and rubbing up against him until Joanne shouted at her. Later, Harlan, Joanne’s husband, said, “Don’t mind Bonita. She’s just a cock tease. Nothing ever happens.”

That may have been, but she didn’t like a woman in her mid-thirties smushing her boobs into her son’s face.

The true and irreversible break with Bonita came when Joanne and Harlan, it was more Harlan, decided to move out of Port Nicollet’s old North End neighALEX BLEDSOE borhood. “You’re what?” Bonita was cooking beef kidneys for dinner when she dropped in. Joanne and Harlan lived across the street in the middle story apartThis story really stuck with me after I first ment of a triplex. That late afternoon, Bonita’s kitchen smelled of urine. read it. It’s filled with details, and in a “You’re moving where?” She stirred the boiling kidneys, which she insisted way, it’s even about a specific detail, one were a real treat, but Joanne thought the kitchen, likely the whole Weir house, that’s heartbreaking in its normality and smelled like a bathroom where absentminded boys routinely missed the toilet. commonness, and in the weight it takes on “Uptown. Four blocks from Roosevelt Elementary.” Joanne already regretted at the end. the move and it hadn’t even happened yet. She knew everyone here in the neighborhood. Over the past eight years they’d rented two different flats that were only two blocks from each other. Harlan grew up three houses down the street from where they were living now. Joanne and her girlfriends would dress to the nines, heels, the works, and walk downtown when the stores stayed open Thursday nights, stop at the Elbo Room for a fifty-cent mixed drink on the walk back to North End. “Uptown.” Bonita said, like the urine stench had finally crept into her own mouth. “That’s rich.”

Harlan wanted the kids to be able to walk to school. The only place better, he told Joanne, would have been a house right across the street from Roosevelt. None of those were for sale.

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She knew he had been thinking, You don’t have a driver’s license. She knew he had believed, It will be a safe walk for the kids mornings and afternoons.

T

he move didn’t cut her off from the bowling team. That was a good thing. She knew the ladies she bowled with on Tuesday league nights, champs three years running. A great bunch of gals in those days. But Joanne knew how nosy they could be. Sometimes it would make her cringe, wondering how much they knew about any of those they spoke about.

Who’s that sleeping around? Her? Oh, that tramp. She kept her mouth shut. Whose kid is having trouble in school? Who’s having trouble in the bedroom? The one who didn’t want to have sex the other night, but her hubby did. Big time. Both feet against the small of her back, he pushed her out of the bed.

Everything, almost everything, had been fair game. But then, with Patrick, it was all, you know, mum. Oh, they sent flowers. They were very kind in their Hallmark way. But then they were mum. That was the word for it. And they didn’t stop by to visit, like they would taint their own families if they did. As if it would happen to one of their kids if they talked to Joanne.

People assumed that they knew what the hardest part was of all this. They were guessing.

The hardest part wasn’t calling Harlan. Those who didn’t know might have thought it would have been. He was second cook on the S.S. Pamela Brown. The Great Lakes freighter steamed away with him every year, into November, sometimes later. Once he was gone for 365 consecutive days and earned a commemorative belt buckle. Calling him when he was in the Port of Ashtabula was not hard at all, although she couldn’t reach him. He wasn’t there. She had to tell his captain, and she imagined the captain telling him, making Harlan go quiet, the news bringing him to his knees. But that wasn’t the hardest part.

That part about not being there. That was the Severson side of the family all over. That was like Harlan’s father, gone when he was most needed.

Harlan’s family, a large one, moved from the farming community of Hamburg, North Dakota, to Port Nicollet and the south shore of Lake Superior in the mid-1920s. They lost a youngster back there in the Hamburg area. That loss was before Harlan’s birth in Port Nicollet. That older brother, he was buried on the North Dakota prairie.

The child’s name was Johnny, and his death would bubble up in conversation with Berit, Harlan’s domineering mother, as she entered her nineties. Johnny’s story would arrive, carried in, a ghost in her guttural voice as she stroked liver spots on the back of an onionskin hand.

“Daddy.” She called her husband Daddy. “Daddy left a basket of chokecherries on the porch. He left them there and off he went with my brothers, Ole and Nels. Off to town like drunkards will do.” She shook her head. “They came back. Ole and Nels. But Daddy, he went off on a bender.”

The oil furnace in the old woman’s living room, it filled a good fifth of the space, ticked with heat. They would wait for her to go on, though they knew the story too well, knew how it ended. The little boy ate the chokecherries that his father had left on the porch and grew sick.

By the time the doctor arrived, and then, much later, the father, Johnny Severson was dead.

The little boy ate the chokecherries that his father had left on the porch and grew sick.

By the time the doctor arrived, and then, much later, the father, Johnny Severson was dead.

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Fiction

Berit dealt with it.

Her mother-in-law dealt with the loss of a child. Joanne had always wondered how.

The New York-based company that owned the shipping line that the S.S. Pamela Brown was a part of flew Harlan Severson home from Ashtabula. Joanne’s brother Andy offered to go pick him up at Duluth International, but she chose to do it by herself.

It was the longest, quietest drive home from Duluth that Joanne and her husband would ever take together. Quiet along Highway 2, except for the rushing summer wind sluicing in on them through the open driver and passenger side windows.

But that wasn’t the hardest part.

J

oanne screamed, anyway she thought she screamed. Was it at the sleepy-eyed police detective? She thought it was the sleepy-eyed one on the phone, the one who asked her whether there was an adult male relative who could come in. He wasn’t even leading the investigation.

Andy, her brother, he would know for sure if she screamed or not. He was there.

The hardest part wasn’t identifying Patrick, though it started out to be. The police wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t let her do that on her own. In fact, they didn’t want her to see him at all. During the phone call, someone asked her, and it could have been the sleepy-eyed detective, then again it might not have been, someone asked her, “Is there an adult male relative who could come in?” The police thought it was a job for a man when, here, she’d carried Patrick for nine months and then given birth to him while Harlan sailed the Great Lakes.

Fourteen years ago. Fourteen. Years. Ago. Andy was there. He went with her to the police station, its entrance at street level, on a side street, not the grand, stepped entrance to City Hall at the front of the imposing brownstone structure. The squad room chatter dropped from locker room towel crack joviality to nothing when Joanne and Andy walked in. One cop, the one she recognized, he was wearing a loud plaid three-piece suit, his sleepy eyes widened briefly, he nodded to them and walked over to a glass-walled office where his partner was, talking with the chief of detectives. The plaid detective interrupted the discussion and Detective Blomfeldt emerged from the office.

The morgue, its walls a milky two-tone institutional green, was one level below the floor of metal desks and interview rooms and reached by a hazardous granite stairwell and hallway that reminded Joanne of Roosevelt Elementary and the kids, Patrick, running in the hall at the bell ending the day.

Blomfeldt knew. She knew. It was Patrick on the autopsy table. He was covered by a white sheet to just below his chin. All the clichés came to her. He looks like he’s sleeping. He looks so peaceful. Before she could criticize herself for thinking that way, her mind switched: Whatever they did—Who were they? Why had she thought “They” instead of “He,” instead of “She”? Did she even think “She”?—whatever was done to him that in the end ended his life did not show on his face, his fourteen-year-old face at rest—his fourteen-year-old face at rest. Why does he need to rest? He’s fourteen. What killed him did not show on his face beyond the purple welt across his right temple and his dark, swollen eyelids.

Blomfeldt looked at her, but Joanne could not even say, “Yes.” Andy settled it. “That’s him. That’s Patrick.”

The hardest part wasn’t identifying Patrick, though it started out to be.

The police wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t let her do that on her own.

In fact, they didn’t want her to see him at all.

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T

he hardest part wasn’t telling Patrick’s sister and brothers. It was like she was Donna Reed, easing the Bailey children’s minds when Jimmy Stewart went off in It’s a Wonderful Life. It was like giving them The Talk, all at once.

“Something has happened to Patrick.”

And Richie, of course, was all ears. Kim didn’t want to hear it and neither did Tommy. It was like they already knew, hearing Joanne talk on the phone in the kitchen. Hearing their mother, what she had to say. No tears. Anger.

Joanne let the two of them slip out of the room. They would be okay.

They were okay, Kim and Tom. They were, weren’t they?

Richie sat on the hassock and listened as she told him, his eyes big and wide.

T

The hardest part wasn’t telling Patrick’s sister and brothers. It was like she was Donna Reed, easing the Bailey children’s minds when Jimmy Stewart went off in It’s a Wonderful Life. It was like giving them The Talk, all at once.

he hardest part wasn’t telling others, because no one else was around, no one outside of the immediate family, and even then, inside, it was not a topic to bring up in conversation over coffee and dessert. It was a violent murder.

She drifted away from the bowling league and continued in the PTA only spottily. Then, through the school group, she met Lynette.

Everyone the Seversons knew had two or four kids. One was rare.

Three? Never. Lynette and her husband had four, like Joanne and Harlan, or like Joanne and Harlan used to have. It was what she was missing. Someone like Lynette. Someone to talk to. Someone to talk with about anything, everything, when you got down to brass tacks.

Then there was this, after months of meeting over coffee and cigarettes, catching up over the phone. Lynette, opening up to her more than Joanne would have expected or would have wanted.

“Can I tell you something? I couldn’t take my eyes off you when I first saw you.”

Joanne thought, Oh, and took a deep breath.

“Not true. I did look away when you glanced my way. Do you remember? That February PTA meeting? That February, the winter after? You know? After Patrick? We went out for lunch at Sully’s after the meeting.

“I couldn’t believe that I’d met the woman, the mother of Patrick Severson. It was beyond what I was used to.

“Can I tell you?”

Joanne felt a sinking. Of her mind. Of her heart. She nodded her head anyway.

“I would drive by your house the rest of that summer and fall, before I knew you, and, do you know, I would not have known you if I happened to see you walking down the street. The photographs in the local newspaper? They didn’t do you justice.

“Seeing where you and your family lived on Marquette. Seeing you, Joanne. Seeing you in the school library for the PTA meetings. You, your house, your life. I couldn’t see how it touched you. Patrick’s killing. Not you. Not the house.” She caught herself. She laughed.

Joanne looked at her. The other woman’s laughter dying with embarrassed abruptness, as if she finally understood.

But then Lynette continued. “Of course, not the house, but still. You know? Total blanks.

I couldn’t understand it. How could you go on? How could everyday life go on? I wanted to understand, but I just couldn’t see how you did it.

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Fiction

“I couldn’t see how you, how any of it, could survive.”

It came out that way, Lynette’s words. A flood. Joanne looked on. The blank described by Lynette.

T

ime passed. It was like those old movies where calendar pages are blown away by the winds of the season. Month by month. Time passed, flew by. Her children got older.

Time passed. But at her core. There. That was where nothing had changed, time had stopped, and it was always the evening that the two police detectives came by the Read more award-winning stories from house without calling, came to the front door, the front door used only emerging and established Wisconsin by relatives arriving for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas dinners, writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction. arriving for celebrations. She had always thought that if any of her kids would get into trouble, it would have been Richie. But, no. It was Patrick.

At the core: Patrick met someone on his Sunday morning paper route and that someone killed him.

At the core: Patrick was dead at fourteen.

What was the hardest part?

The hardest part was the sound of him leaving the house that Sunday morning in 1966.

Remembering that thump of the solid kitchen door, the slap of the screen door, she could hear both sounds from her second floor bedroom at the front of the house.

Joanne lived in that house on the corner of 16th and Marquette, four blocks from Roosevelt Elementary, for forty-six years beyond 1966, until her surviving children, at Richie’s urging, moved her to Saint Thérèse’s By the Bay. And in all those forty-six years that she lived in that house, all of the other departures by the back door, from out of the kitchen and into the backyard and into the wider world, each reminded her of Patrick’s leaving that Sunday morning. That was it. The thump of the back door closing, followed by the slap of the screen door. The sounds that she heard behind the mask of her face.

It was always that one Sunday morning in 1966.

Jeff Esterholm’s short stories have previously appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review, the Akashic Books online flash fiction series Mondays Are Murder, Crime Factory, Flash Fiction Italia, Midwestern Gothic, REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, Shotgun Honey, and Yellow Mama. In 2013, he received the Larry and Eleanor Sternig Short Fiction Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He and his wife live in Superior.

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Fiction

Where

GENIUS

Lives.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Anne Basting is the first Wisconsin professor in nearly 20 years to win a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Her cutting-edge work uses the arts to reframe how we look at aging and care for the elderly.

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Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry Honorable Mention Poems from our 2017 Poetry Contest

Old Dish He’s from southern Indiana my neighbor across the hall fifty-five and second shift he came to Wisconsin found work at the foundry I tend to be shy and avoid conversation but when his fiancée died from too many opiates her popping of prescriptions not always obvious just his nagging suspicion I made him shepherd’s pie he called his mother to tell her his mother who remembers days before pill mills before the decline days she danced jitterbug to the juke box rocked hard rocked fast to the beat of promised prosperity when he told her about the shepherd’s pie she said Now, that’s an old dish he said It has everything, too, meat, vegetables, and potatoes.

Sylvia Cavanaugh, Cedar Grove

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Poetry

At the Abandoned Lumberjack Cemetery Outside of Seney in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am with my two young sons at a forgotten cemetery on one of those August afternoons before school starts when you try to wring out one more cool thing to do before the end of summer.

It is late in the afternoon but the sun is still high so far north and the shadows of the tree branches fall over the clearing like gathering tendrils.

The ground of several graves have fallen into depressions a few feet deep as the wooden boxes and bones have returned to the sandy muck. As a joke, I lie down in one of the holes in the ground. For awhile, I hear the boys scampering about and then it turns quiet and I know they have followed my lead lying still in their own sunken beds of cool grass.

While we lie there looking at the sky wars are being fought, ice caps are melting, languages are becoming extinct, my sons are growing older where time is now beyond time where if only we could stay.

Thomas J. Erickson, Whitefish Bay

Read more award-winning poems from emerging and established Wisconsin poets at wisconsinacademy.org/poetry.

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Poetry

The Suitcase I remember the brown, hard-shelled suitcase with its shiny brass latches and its canvas divider that separated my mother’s clothes from my father’s sitting open on the couch before my parents went away on their first vacation I was five, or maybe six scared and full of questions but when it returned a week later full of dirty clothes and a giant lollipop from Niagara Falls oh, the feeling of relief in seeing that suitcase again sweeter than any swirl of multi-colored sugar on a stick Years later that same old suitcase its latches dulled sat open on a bed in some hotel room in Indiana on the way to my college my father’s clothes all stuffed on one side the divider cinched but bulging the other half empty And I thought of my mom living her new life out west with her new man who would never confine her to half a shell As my father stared out the window looking overwhelmed by the vastness of the cornfields Elisabeth Harrahy, Oconomowoc

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Poetry

After You’re Struck by a Semi while Playing the Good Samaritan When the heat index reaches 105, I sit flat on Mother’s caution to not leave the house

without clean panties or you’ll get hit by a truck for I’ve just discovered that without a pair either clean or dirty, the heat moves freely through the tent of my dress. Just as the soles of my unshod feet meet the sheen of the bathroom tiles, I absorb the reflected shade that maple trees bounce off grass.

I’m a panther in this new nakedness when I ask my department supervisor for a raise, walk to the podium and address the city-wide council, hit a vibrato at the choir audition.

My entire body sings like a baby when it laughs which neither you nor I could ever imagine since Mother put us in ribbons and ruffles, strapped our toes tight into Mary Janes, slapped hands if we left the porch.

I’m going to squat over that seventh grade summer we ditched our best friend at Camp Wah-Ha-To-See because of the rumor Everyone comes between Janine and her Calvins when virginity was no longer a barter chip for marriage, yet not something you shucked for just any boy either.

I called you Saint Louise when we fought; you refused to buck Mother.

But you just convinced me not to wait to get old to get smart, not to decline the third glass of wine nor pass up the pecans plastered with fudge because now I want to make up for all the American women who want to fit into size zero jeans, then starve themselves to do it, and for the Janines whose summers get branded by rumors and for goody two-shoe daughters who wear clean underwear and get hit by trucks regardless Shoshauna Shy, Madison

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BOOK REVIEW

Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems

by Margaret Rozga Lit Fest Press, 123 pages, $16.95 Reviewed by Mark Zimmermann

Milwaukee poet Margaret Rozga’s new collection, Pestiferous Questions: A Verse Biography, is a work that’s as much a meditation on 19th-century American history as it is a well-researched life study of the book’s main figure, Jessie Benton Frémont (1824–1902).

The book, written completely in verse, is also a corrective to our contemporary memory of Benton Fremont as a subordinate to two powerful men in her life: father Thomas Hart Benton, a U.S. Senator from Missouri who railed against the “pestiferous question” of slavery, and husband and famed explorer John Charles Frémont.

While these men have their place in the collection, Benton Frémont is the subject or narrator of most of the poems, interpreting (perhaps not always reliably) the events of her milieu.

In “Jessie: Happiest Hours, But Then,” the Benton Frémont of Rozga’s imagination reprises her role as the well-known author who captured the public imagination with stories of her husband’s frontier exploits: … He had claimed the highest Rockies peak and spread that same windwhipt flag, over us. Triumphant time. More acclaim for the printed report I wrote from Mr. Frémont’s spoken word, purpose-driven days, our best—family, work, jointly done.

The couple’s widely praised writings romanticized the West, spurred waves of Euro-American migration, helped make Manifest Destiny a national cause, and played a key role in the systematic dispossession of indigenous peoples who stood in the way of territorial expansion. While Rozga attends to Benton Frémont’s private life and personal feelings in a sympathetic, even loving way, she questions the legacy of continental conquest. In “Manifest Destiny,” Rozga writes, “[N]ot my history / not mine the brassy / territorial dreams.”

Elsewhere she notes that the Frémonts were staunch abolitionists dedicated to keeping slavery out of newly occupied frontier lands. How the couple stood firmly for the emancipation of one people while advocating the brutal oppression of another—Frémont himself led U.S. Army units in at least three massacres of Native Americans—is one of the challenges Rozga faces in trying to understand her subjects. Readers of Pestiferous Questions will face it, too.

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I admire these poems, not least because of the author’s choice and placement of quotes as well as paraphrases of historical sources, memoirs, and personal correspondence. Rozga respects facts; she prioritizes and delivers on context. In this way, her research itself is an imaginative act. Rozga’s poems reveal a complicated and conflicted Jessie Benton Frémont—a thoroughly believable historical player who can be understood, even liked and respected at moments, though not without reservation.

Because Rozga is such a skilled poet and storyteller, multifaceted lives of people gradually emerge as the book progresses, events unfold; the resultant dramas reveal a troubled and troubling American history. In capturing this historical moment in verse, Margaret Rozga gives her readers memorable poetry, a fine life story of Jessie Benton Frémont, and a history they can draw upon to ponder the pestiferous questions of our day.

Mark Zimmermann is author of the Pushcart Prize-nominated collection Impersonations (Pebblebrook Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in New Letters, Cream City Review, Verse Wisconsin, New Verse News, The Writer, and Vocabula Review. Zimmermann is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets, and has served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission since 2004. He lives and teaches in Milwaukee.

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

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