Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2023

Language of the Land: Geologist Marcia Bjornerud

Champion Trees • Fall Foraging • Writing Contest Winners

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Ursa Anderson • Exhibitions and Outreach Coordinator Madison Buening • External Relations Coordinator Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Lizzie Condon • Director of Science and Climate Programs Lulu Fregoso • Climate & Energy Intern Jessica James • Climate & Energy Program Manager Erika Monroe-Kane • Executive Director Matt Rezin • Operations Manager Zack Robins • Director of Development Madeline Schultz • Climate & Energy Intern Yong Cheng Yang (Yong Cha) • Visitor Services Associate, James Watrous Gallery ACADEMY BOARD OF DIRECTORS Chan Stroman • President Roberta Filicky-Peneski • President-Elect Tom Luljak • Immediate Past President Richard Donkle • Treasurer Thomas W. Still • Secretary Robert D. Mathieu • Vice President of Sciences Amy Horst • Vice President of Arts Kimberly Blaeser • Vice President of Letters Mark Bradley • Foundation President Steve Ackerman, Madison Ruben Anthony, Madison Lillian Brown, Ripon Frank D. Byrne, Monona Jay Handy, Madison BJ Hollars, Eau Claire Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Kevin Reilly, Verona Brent Smith, La Crosse

Editor’s Note

Marla Bergh

WISCONSIN ACADEMY

OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

There’s nothing quite like holding a magazine in your hands. Amid the constant hum of our fast-paced, increasingly digital world, opening a magazine and getting lost in its stories and images feels deliberate, intentional, like a well-deserved and much-needed retreat.

And there’s so much to enjoy within this, our fall issue. Bill Berry uncovers the living history of Wisconsin’s tallest trees—and the people who work to keep their legacies recorded.

Kristine Hansen takes us mushroom foraging in Wisconsin’s autumn woods, while Rudy Molinek tags along with Appleton geologist Marcia Bjornerud as she inspires students in the art and science of reading the landscape.

Additiona l highlights include winners of the Wisconsin Academy’s Fiction and Poetry Contests.

Matt Cashion’s story, “Music Appreciation for Dead People,” is beautiful, wrenching, and likely to stick with you long after you read it, as it has for me, and the three top-ranking poems invite you to slow down and linger over each poet’s exquisite choice of words.

The lines I keep returning to are the final two in “My Son Standing Near a Glass of Water,” in which Sheryl Slocum writes: an ordinary container bearing prisms so fleeting,/ I must look once again twice.

It’s this level of noticing, of appreciating, that I crave in this season. And I hope you also find time this fall to soak in its subtle shifts and dramatic moments, to find things that make you pause and look once again twice.

Perhaps the pages of this magazine will have that effect. As a longtime admirer of both the Wisconsin Academy and the special magic of magazines, I am honored to serve as interim editor of this issue. Please join me in extending gratitude to the staff, contributors, and sources who all helped bring it to life.

Happy fall, and happy reading.

ACADEMY FOUNDATION Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) • Foundation Founder Mark Bradley • Foundation President Kristen Carreira • Foundation Vice-President Richard Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary Betty Custer Roberta Filicky-Peneski Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak Andrew Richards Chan Stroman Steve Wildeck

On the cover: Marcia Bjornerud photographed in Appleton by Daniel Damiani.

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CONTENTS 01

Editor’s Note

eline Grace Martin

04 From the Director Wisconsin Table

06 Mushrooming Interest

M ad

Kristine Hansen

Profile

12 Language of the Land: Marcia Bjornerud Teaches Students to Hear What the Earth is Saying

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Rudy Molinek and Catie DeMets

Essay

20 Tree Champions Bill Berry

Essay

26 Cultivating Art, Agriculture, and Impact in Sauk County Sarah E. White

@ Watrous Gallery

Jacque Enge

36 Women of Water and Of Words and Trees

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VOLUME 69 · NUMBER 4 FALL • 2023

06 Fiction

40 Music Appreciation for Dead People Matt Cashion

Poetry

48 2023 Contest Winners

Taylor Kirby, K.E. McCoy, Sheryl Slocum

Book Reviews

52 Roze & Blud by Jayson Iwen Reviewed by Anthony Bukoski

53 The Clayfields by Elise Gregory Reviewed by Jill Stukenberg

54 Recovery by J.L. Conrad Reviewed by Dale M. Kushner

55 Dear Weirdo by Abraham Smith Reviewed by Lydia O’Donnell

Climate & Energy Spotlight

56 Bridging Divides in Marathon County and Beyond Lizzie Condon

Jessica Ross

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

Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

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

Copyright © 2023 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

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

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

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

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

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

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Sharon Vanorny

From the Director

Often when we go through transitions, we discover that with the new reality comes a reinforcement of our core principles or values.

As fall has arrived, my focus has been on change—in my personal life and at the Academy. As so many parents have done over generations, I recently helped my oldest child move out of our home for the first time. At the Academy, we have been reflecting on and crystallizing a vision for the next chapter. In both cases, it has been essential to remember, and keep in sight, what is most important.

Delving into the vast social science on successfully managing change, I found a key strategy emerging: Find and focus on a through line that asks How is the future connected to the past? At 153 years old and going strong, the Academy has welcomed and connected Wisconsinites to extraordinary people and ideas. The Academy has always centered itself around intellectual independence, nonpartisanship, and the enlightening power of the sciences, arts, and letters. This is true of the Academy today.

Currently, we see a continued and increasing need to build relationships, establish common ground, and cultivate respectful dialogue, even as we explore powerful and sometimes challenging topics. We are taking steps so that the Academy increasingly

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reflects the expertise of a broader range of Wisconsinites, including those from outside academia and from communities too long overlooked. And while we hold more programming outside Madison and ensure online participation is an option, the experiences that we offer will continue to reflect the spirit and mandate envisioned for the Academy over a century and a half ago.

As we find ways to improve and move forward, the core of the Academy remains our touchstone: that when we engage together with the sciences, arts, and letters, it improves life in Wisconsin.

In the Academy’s case as well as with my personal transition as a parent of a grown child, we are building toward a sustained, strong connection. Seasons and times change, but what is important endures.

Erika Monroe-Kane, Executive Director

News for Members NOMINATE AN ACADEMY FELLOW We need your help to identify and nominate outstanding people for the Wisconsin Academy’s highest honor, becoming an Academy Fellow.

Fellows are honored for demonstrating the highest levels of accomplishment and impact through the arts, sciences, or letters* (or some combination of these in their careers) and for their dedication to civil discourse and public service contributing to the wellbeing of the people of Wisconsin. (*The Letters category is broadly defined and meant to include writers, poets, storytellers, historians, lawyers, philosophers, and those who study or apply language to inform, inspire, or communicate ideas with others.)

We have simplified the process of nominating potential Fellows. The process involves: 1. Filling out a nomination form (find it at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows/nominate-fellow) that provides contact information for yourself and contact and demographic information for the nominee 2. Writing a brief statement of the impacts of the nominee’s work (250 characters including spaces) and a concise nomination statement (500 words maximum) 3. Including copy of the nominee’s resume, CV, or a list of their relevant experiences and qualifications (3 pages maximum) We thank you for your help in continuing the excellence of the Academy.

LETTERS We truly want to hear from you. Please send your feedback and comments about Wisconsin People & Ideas and other Academy programs to emonroekane@wisconsinacademy.org.

AG R I C U LT U R E & R U R A L RESILIENCE SUMMIT With a focus on driving collaboration and inclusion for a sustainable future, this event is a transformative platform for stakeholders to address pressing climate challenges.

Organized by the Wisconsin Academy, the summit takes place October 21 at the W.R. Davies Student Center in Eau Claire. wisconsinacademy.org/events

A C E L E B R AT I O N O F T I M E The finale of the Academy’s series on Wisconsin geology will feature lunch catered by Ho-Chunk Nation member and chef Elena Terry of Wild Bearies, a talk from Academy Fellow and geologist Dr. Marcia Bjornerud on the nature of geological time, and a presentation from a Ho-Chunk Nation leader on the history of Maa Wákąčąk. This October 22 event will take place in Prairie du Sac and be livestreamed for a virtual audience. Event partners include the Wisconsin Science Festival, Ho-Chunk Nation, Color in the Outdoors, the Ice Age Trail Alliance, and the Badger History Group. wisconsinacademy.org/events

T H E DAW N O F T H E JA M E S W E B B S PAC E T E L E S C O P E E R A Some of Wisconsin’s brightest astronomical minds have been working hard to engineer the technology behind the James Webb Space Telescope and to interpret the data coming down from it. Meet one of these scientists, University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer Dr. Michael Maseda, in this free Academy event held on October 24, both in person at the Mead Public Library in Sheboygan and virtually. wisconsinacademy.org/events

FICTION AND POE TRY CONTEST WINNERS Meet the winners of the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2023 Fiction & Poetry Contests, along with Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig, at this Wisconsin Book Festival reading on November 7 at the Madison Public Library’s Central Branch. wisconsinbookfestival.org/events

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Jessica Ross

Wisconsin Table

Chanterelles are a type of edible mushroom found in the summer and parts of the fall in Wisconsin.

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Wisconsin Table

MUSHROOMING INTER EST

BY KRISTINE HANSEN

J

essica Ross, a conservation biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, knew nothing about

mushroom foraging before moving to Wisconsin. But trekking through forests in search of fungi was already in her DNA.

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Jessica Ross

Jessica Ross

Michael Marit

Michael Marit

Wisconsin Table

Top left: A Door Peninsula Mushroom Club foray at Whitefish Dunes State Park. Top right: Lobster mushrooms. Bottom left: Black Trumpet mushrooms. Bottom right: Discoveries on a Madison Mycological Society foray.

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Jessica Ross

Wisconsin Table

Edible and inedible mushrooms from a Madison Mycological Society foray.

“I have family members going back generations who were mushroom hunters,” she says. “I always had a twinkle in my eye about mushrooms and [the Madison Mycological Society] helped me grow in my knowledge.”

That same curiosity drew Michael Marit of Sturgeon Bay, who is active with the Door Peninsula Mushroom Club, to mushroom foraging.

“I became attracted to mushrooms when I first started noticing how quickly they emerge from the forest floor and then disappear,” he says. “It was mysterious and something I wanted to understand better.”

What Marit particularly enjoys studying is the importance of mushrooms to our ecosystem, how plant roots and mushroom mycelium share nutrients, the potential for mushrooms to be used in bioremediation to remove pollutants, and mushrooms’ nutritional and medicinal benefits.

Most mushrooms are found either in soil or on wood, such as logs or trees, and some mushroom species grow only on particular tree species. Most edible mushroom species grow statewide, but some grow only in certain parts of the state.

Ross says fall is one of the best times for mushroom foraging in Wisconsin because there are lots of autumn species, like Hen of the Woods, Black Trumpet, and Golden Oyster. Some of the summer species, like Chicken of the Woods, are also still holding on—and due to their bright orange color, they are one of the easiest to identify.

Chanterelles, too, can be found throughout the state.

Plus, you can’t beat the fall’s crisp, cool weather and the opportunities it provides for immersions into brilliantly hued foliage, and seasonal shifts in weather are usually prime times to find mushrooms.

“Think going from the dormancy of winter into spring, and going from hot summer to cooling off into the fall,” says Marit. “Rain and moisture are other key elements for mushrooms to be abundant.”

Both Ross and Marit credit local mushroom clubs for keeping them safe—knowing what’s poisonous and what’s the real deal— and inviting them on mushroom hunts, also known as forays.

A common question for new foragers is where to go. “Any forested area would be good for mushroom hunting,” says Ross, who will even hunt at parks within a mile of her Madison home. It doesn’t have to be a state park or national forest.

For new mushroom foragers, Ross suggests beginning with easyto-identify mushrooms, like morels or oysters, as they don’t have poisonous look-alikes. And while mushroom hunting might seem like an ideal meditative, solo activity, taking a more seasoned hunter with you is a good idea.

“You’ll have people who have been doing it for years and years,” says Ross, adding that experienced foragers can show you different species and the habitats where each kind is usually found.

In addition to forays, local clubs often host workshops and lectures.

“Our focus is on education, celebration, and building community around mushrooms,” says Marit. “We teach how to cultivate mushrooms at home (indoors or outdoors), how to use mushrooms in art, how to cook with them, and safe and responsible foraging.”

Once mushrooms are foraged and are sitting in one’s kitchen, what are some good recipes? Ross suggests looking to the mushroom species for inspiration.

“A lot of mushroom names have this meat analog and can be used as a meat substitute,” she says. “For example, Chicken of the Woods can be battered and fried, like chicken fingers.”

If blessed with an abundance of mushrooms, many foragers cook and freeze them, or dehydrate or pickle.

But should a hunt not prove to be very fruitful, don’t fret.

“I’ve noticed more high-end mushrooms, like Lion’s Mane, Maitake, and Shiitake, are showing up in the grocery stores,” says Marit.

To receive maximum nutrition, don’t eat a mushroom raw. “Raw mushrooms are hard for your body to break down,” says Marit.

“The heat of cooking helps to break down the mushroom for better digestion.”

The public’s increasing interest in and appetite for mushrooms means knowledge about them will continue to grow.

“A decade or two ago it would have been much harder to know what to do with mushrooms in cooking,” says Marit. “But, especially in the last couple of years, more people are learning about mushrooms and using them in all sorts of creative ways in the kitchen.”

Based in Milwaukee, Kristine Hansen is the author of three non-fiction books about Wisconsin including, most recently, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin: How America’s Most Famous Architect Found Inspiration in His Home State. She contributes to Milwaukee Magazine and the websites for Travel + Leisure, Architectural Digest, Fodor’s, and Condé Nast Traveler.

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Michael Marit

Michael Marit

Wisconsin Table

Like many mycological groups, the Door Peninsula Mushroom Club holds forays and events throughout the year.

Want to learn more about mushrooms and foraging?

Check out these Wisconsin organizations’ websites and Facebook groups:

DOOR PENINSULA MUSHROOM CLUB doorpeninsulamushroomclub.carrd.co, facebook.com/DPMushroomClub

FUNGAL BIOLOGY SUPERGROUP AT UW–MADISON fungi.wisc.edu/

MADISON MYCOLOGICAL SOCIETY madisonmycologicalsociety.com, facebook.com/MadisonMycoSociety/

NORTHWESTERN WISCONSIN MYCO ENTHUSIASTS facebook.com/groups/667766437208263

UW–LA CROSSE MYCOLOGY CLUB facebook.com/uwlaxmycology

WILD FOOD WISCONSIN facebook.com/groups/1509621176012491/

WISCONSIN MYCOLOGICAL SOCIETY wisconsinmycologicalsociety.org, facebook.com/wismycosociety

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Wisconsin Table

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Daniel Damiani

Profile

Lawrence University geosciences professor Marcia Bjornerud at the Poppy’s Rock Natural State Area in New London.

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Profile

LANGUAGE OF THE LAND MARCIA BJORNERUD TEACHES STUDENTS TO HEAR WHAT THE EARTH IS SAYING

BY RUDY MOLINEK AND CATIE DEME TS

I

magine you’re nineteen years old again. It’s a crisp fall afternoon, and you’re looking out the window of a cramped college fleet van. You’re watching the mini malls of

Wisconsin’s Fox Valley evaporate into farm fields. It’s the first field trip of the year in your new introductory geology class—the ambitiously named History of Earth and Life— at Lawrence University in Appleton.

You’re jostled awake from an unintentional doze as the van stops in some sort of marshland. Ahead, something strange: Out of the marsh rises a steep fifty-foot-high hill, scarred by an old gravel quarry dug into the slope.

The only instruction you’re given is to head to the hill, observe it, feel it, and figure out how the heck the landform got there. Your professor will answer questions but none that will give away the answers you seek. You and your classmates are told to work together; until you’ve figured it out, no one is leaving the marsh.

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Marcia Bjornerud takes a break on a bed of quartzite near Baraboo.

The architect of this devious pedagogical strategy is Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist and the Walter Schober Professor of Environmental Studies at Lawrence University and a Wisconsin Academy Fellow. Marcia is a nearly lifelong Wisconsinite, excepting some brief stints near and far afield in dogged pursuit of her beloved rocks.

She lived her early years surrounded by the farmlands outside of Eau Claire, spending unrestricted days exploring the outdoors and practicing an early version of what she would eventually ask of her students in the marsh: observing and coming into relationship with the landscape around her.

As a child, Marcia never intended to become a scientist, much less a geologist. In school, science was not presented as a feasible path, and the way it was taught didn’t interest her—despite her reflection now that, even in her youth, she was already “a natural scientist of [her] own kind, observing phenology out in the woods” near her home.

But as a student in an introductory geology class at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, something struck a chord.

Geology, one of the more recently developed natural sciences, gave Marcia a language to describe the Earth she’d gotten to know intimately as a child. Etymology is the study of the origins of words; for Marcia, geology provided “an etymology of the world.” With this new language, she was entranced.

After a year in Northfield, Marcia transferred a short drive up Interstate 35 to the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where

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she finished her BS, specializing in geophysics. Then she returned to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison for an MS and PhD in structural geology, a subdiscipline focused on “the architecture of the Earth’s crust” and the way the movement of tectonic plates deforms rocks in mountain belts.

In 1987, degree fresh in hand, Marcia completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ohio State University and then began a professorship at Miami University of Ohio. During the summers, she explored the high Arctic, researching ancient mountain ranges on Ellesmere Island in Canada and on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. From her travel and research, she produced peer-reviewed papers that appeared in such publications as the Journal of Structural Geology and Tectonics. Then, in 1995, following a desire to delve more into teaching, Marcia took a job as a professor in the geology department at Lawrence University, where she still teaches and produces research.

However, if you were Marcia’s student, looking up from the base of that mysterious hill in a marsh, you wouldn’t be learning her biographical details. Instead, she’d want you to be learning the etymology of the Earth. She’d want you to be learning a native language you might not realize you already know how to speak: the language of an Earthling. In doing so, she’d hope that you would begin to glimpse yourself as part of the subtle and magnificent systems which that language reveals.

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You and your classmates approach the hill. A few energetic students scramble up the loose gravel sides of the old quarry to get to the top as quickly as possible. You and your more careful peers instead pause to look closely at the loose sediment at the base. The shovels of bygone quarriers have offered you a window into the interior structure of the hill. Looking closely, you notice patterns emerging from the jumble of sand and gravel. Instead of being arranged randomly, the larger rocks seem concentrated in horizontal lines, with beds of sand in between. It occurs to you that somehow, some force has sorted this sediment into discrete layers based on the size of the grains. The person beside you murmurs that something about the rocks is strange—they don’t look at all like the limestone that is so common nearby. Suddenly, a shout rings out from the climbers above: “Everyone come up here! This isn’t just a regular hill, it’s long and wriggly, like a snake!”

You might be wondering, rightfully so, why we’re talking about words, language, and etymology in this profile of Marcia’s career in science. Marcia herself acknowledged the apparent disparity of linguistics and geology in a 1995 journal article, “Geolinguistics: Tracing the origins of geologic terms.” “One is about the supple, evolving brain, the other about hard, unchanging rock,” she says. But, for her, rocks and language have always been deeply intertwined.

Both words and rocks record the past. Words are records of human history and changing thought; rocks are an archive of our planetary saga. Understanding both holds the power to change how we see the world around us. In “Geolinguistics,” Marcia tells us that, “just as most people see rocks every day without giving thought to their origins, most people use words every day without recognizing their deep roots. One’s experience of a landscape is enriched, however, by an understanding of the geologic processes that have shaped it. Similarly, one’s sense of humanity is enhanced by knowledge of the origins of the words bequeathed to us by ancient peoples.”

The connections between rocks and words go deeper, though, than simply a similarity between the philosophies of geology and linguistics. Deeper, too, than the rich cultural history of the words we use to describe geologic phenomena (though there is plenty of that—for some examples, see Marcia’s most recent book Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities). Marcia asks us to bring these philosophies into relationship with one another; when we do so, we begin to sense the many subtle yet profound ways that Earth speaks to us.

To appreciate what Marcia means by this, it is helpful to understand one of her fundamental precepts—that rocks and the Earth are, in fact, animate, active, and evolving. As she often says, “Rocks are not nouns, but verbs.” It can be tempting to think of rocks as eternal or timeless. After all, we deem permanent things as “set in stone.” But as Marcia explains, rocks “aren’t just there—they become.

Each rock embodies an event, and in some cases, multiple events.”

Marcia becomes electric while teaching about this concept on field trips to Baraboo, Wisconsin, a place she knows intimately.

There, a distinctive, somewhat glassy purple rock stands out spectacularly against the green trees and blue lake at Tewakącąk (known on settler maps as Devil’s Lake State Park). This rock is quartzite—a

metamorphic rock consisting almost entirely of quartz, once buried deep beneath the surface. But this rock’s texture and markings reveal that this was once sandstone, whose origins were a tropical white-sand beach along an inland sea.

The Tewakącąk quartzite exemplifies Earth’s unique planetary mechanism for preserving and delivering its layered memories to the surface. It’s easy to imagine a planet where sediment piles up and volcanoes erupt, burying old rocks deeper and deeper, so that the only strata accessible are the most recent. On some planets, this is how sediments remain forever—the oldest rocks’ secrets are buried deep beneath the surface, never to be exhumed.

But here on Earth, plate tectonics disrupt this inexorable cycle.

When plates of the Earth’s crust move and collide, some rocks involved are pulled deep into the Earth to melt and, eventually, form new igneous rocks. But others, like the Baraboo sandstone, are chaotically crumpled, folded, and wrinkled up into mountain ranges, where they very slowly erode to leave fresh windows into the past.

The purple quartzite at Tewakącąk is one of these windows, the exposed core of an ancient mountain belt, where the intense heat and pressure at the heart of those now eroded mountains transformed the Baraboo sandstone to purple quartzite. Improbably, 1.6 billion years after the Baraboo beach was buried, lithified to stone, then violently crumpled into the heart of a mountain belt and metamorphosed, you can still touch its original ripple marks and be transported to an ancient shore, feeling the wind and waves that tossed the grains now part of this iconic purple stone.

In this way, Marcia tells us, rocks become storytellers. The quartzite at Baraboo tells a story of past environmental change.

By tracking the shape of ripple marks in different layers, or strata, preserved from its sedimentary past, geologists can discern how the flow of water changed over a billion years ago. They can also see changes in the strata that show how sea level rose, as the lowest layers appear to be remnants of a calm-watered estuary or fossilized soil, while the top layers reveal the gradual inundation of those sandy beaches. These are tales the rock tells of past environmental change. By learning these stories at places like Baraboo, or from sediments on the ocean floor or ice cores taken from the poles, we come to better understand the limits and reactivity of Earth systems. Stories are the way humans pass down intergenerational memories and lessons. As Marcia imparts in Baraboo, the Earth also uses stories to pass down knowledge, if we learn how to listen.

Imagine you and all your classmates have now made it to the top of the sinuous hill. From this vantage, you can see that the sides are steep like a knife’s edge, and it does indeed wind across the marsh’s otherwise flat profile. As you catch your breath from the climb, Marcia begins to ask some questions to get the creative problem-solving started: “Now, how do you think this snakeshaped hill got here? Pose some hypotheses—it’s okay if you’re wrong.” There’s some silence. You have half an idea but don’t want to be the first person to say something wrong. The quiet becomes strained, everyone hoping somebody else will guess first.

Finally, a voice behind you, tentative and questioning: “Maybe it was a river?” Ah, now the collaborative thinking has begun, but no, it can’t be a river. The shape is right, the curvature and the type of sediment are right … but rivers cut into the landscape and

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leave a valley, they don’t create a hill. Even though it was wrong, this answer breaks the silence, and now students are genuinely curious and eager to tackle this mystery.

Marcia Bjornerud visited her “dream house” in Tuscany while teaching a semester-long course in the Italian Apennines through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. She has “traveled all over the world to study mountain belts ancient and recent.”

Stories are the way humans pass down intergenerational memories and lessons. As Marcia imparts in Baraboo, the Earth also uses stories to pass down knowledge, if we learn how to listen.

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Learning to listen to the Earth and its stories is difficult. Earth is a messy place, and its stories are complicated, intertwining, and cyclical. And, as Marcia tells us, a geologist or student of Earth systems has “to be open to the possibility that you’re going to see rocks of any habitat, anywhere. … You have to be familiar with all of these species of rocks and then be able to conjure up in your imagination what habitats those rocks represent.” As an Earth scientist, you must have the skills to interrogate and discern the vast library of rocks and minerals you might find at the Earth’s surface. You also need the imagination to take these identifications and weave them together into a coherent plot that tells a story of the environmental situations that could create such rocks and landforms. By applying these skills, you can begin to hear the Earth speaking to you.

Marcia has spent her career seeking ways to help her students learn these skills. It’s not an easy task. Some students, like Marcia herself, come to geology without thinking of themselves as scientists. In fact, sometimes it is exactly this feeling that guides them to geology in the first place: Biology, chemistry, and physics, with their test tubes and theoretical equations, seem too intimidating, but geology seems more tangible and hands-on. Students learn, eventually, that geology integrates all these fields, as it takes physical, chemical, and biological processes to make rocks, but the approachability of geology brings students in the door. Once they’re inside her classroom (or outside on her field trips), Marcia’s work begins.

Marcia’s educational philosophy is inspired by her own experience as a young geologist. She wants “everybody to feel welcome, and to know that they bring all the skills they need to do this particular science.” Her goal is to “try to coax out of people the latent scientist … in everybody.”

The detective work required on their first field trip each fall builds self-confidence in her students, who arrive in the marsh with no formal training in geology but, by the end of the day, have succeeded in reading the story of a landscape. Interspersed with this heuristic approach, Marcia delivers knowledge directly to the students. But by enabling moments of self-derived epiphany, she hopes her students “develop the habits of mind, confidence, and the instinct of how to go about thinking about the Earth.”

This is not to say Marcia thinks everyone should become a professional geologist. She believes that “the habits of geologic thinking are important for anybody,” ranging from the practical—“understanding where your drinking water comes from, or what climate change is going to mean for your particular community”—to the intangible—“that there is spiritual or some kind of existential comfort in understanding where you are in a local and more global sense.” For Marcia, geology offers a way to satisfy a “hunger to reconnect with place, this intrinsic, if unmet, need to feel connection.”

Marcia’s work to facilitate this sense of connection doesn’t end at the border of Lawrence’s campus. Her first book, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of Earth, published for a general audience in 2005, reveals the planetary history that Earth tells, and how we can read this history. In 2018, she published Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. This book explores the idea that

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READING ROCKS: A PRIMER If you’ve had any introduction to geology, you’re probably familiar with the three main rock types: sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic. Each carries memory in its own way.

Sedimentary rocks are deposited in layers directly through environmental processes. Each layer, or bed, is an integration of all the environmental conditions the sedimentary particles experience on their journey to their eventual bed—eroded from a rock, perhaps, into a smaller particle that tumbles down a hill into a river, where it is carried downstream until it’s deposited somewhere along the way along with countless other particles. In this way, sedimentary rocks have a near-continuous memory of past environmental change.

Igneous rocks hold more catastrophic memories. These rocks cool from molten magma, initially either erupted into Earth’s atmosphere (extrusive volcanics) or upwelled less violently into the planet’s crust (intrusive). Both forms express the composition of Earth’s interior, surfacing memories of what lies deep beneath our feet. While intrusive igneous rocks solidify slowly over time, petrifying memories of their cooling journey from the Earth’s mantle to its surface, extrusive volcanics cool almost instantaneously when they erupt into air or water, and record both their birth and Earth as it was in that moment of ossification.

Metamorphic rocks’ memories are perhaps the most complex. These rocks, plunged from the surface back into the Earth’s interior as the crust deforms (such as when tectonic plates collide), are then transformed into new rocks by heat and pressure beneath the surface.

Metamorphic rocks have two stages of memory, the first at least partially rewritten by the second as if the rock formation were a planetary palimpsest or a poorly erased chalkboard.

Looking at a metamorphic rock, we can read the story of both a distant past Earth and the rock’s more recent path from surface to depth and back, tracing a journey through the heat and pressure it encountered during its metamorphosis.

Earth’s geologic system miraculously preserves these myriad memories in ways we can access across the world.

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pervasive chronophobia, or being “unwilling to think honestly about the power of time to change us and the world,” is the source of many environmental problems. She proposes the antidote of “timefulness,” the understanding that “everything is made by time and will continue to be altered in time … learning to live with that rather than somehow battling it or thinking we can do an end run around it or just ignore it.”

In 2022, she published the aforementioned Geopedia, and she is currently working on her fourth book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks. Marcia has also contributed to the New Yorker and written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She’s appeared on numerous podcasts and radio programs. Through her writing, Marcia hopes to help her students and fellow Earthlings see their world in a new, richer, and more wonderous way.

The excitement builds as you and your classmates zero in on an answer. “Could it be a beach, like this was the shoreline and the waves pushed up all this debris?” A good thought, but beaches aren’t generally so curvy. Then you remember all those strange, foreign rocks your classmate noticed earlier at the base of the hill.

Beaches don’t usually have rocks from lots of different places far away, you posit. A peer excitedly offers an idea: “Don’t glaciers bring rocks from far away? And wasn’t Wisconsin covered by glaciers in the Ice Age? Maybe this all got dumped here by the flowing ice and the glacier bulldozed it into a hill?” Not a bad guess. But wouldn’t that process jumble up all the different grain sizes? Why did you see layers? Even so, something about the glacier idea makes sense. You’ve seen photos of rivers on top of the ice in Greenland. “What if these rocks were moved here by a river on the surface of the glacier? Then when it all melted, this was left behind?” Just as your thought was sparked by your peer’s idea, the student next to you seems inspired by your proposal. “That seems close, but I don’t think the nice layers could have survived all the melting. Could there have been a river under the glacier?

Since water always takes the path of least resistance, maybe it was easier for the river to erode up into the ice than to cut down into the land below?” You notice Marcia smile. The class has done it! Marcia confirms that you’re standing on top of what geologists call an esker, the deposit of a subglacial drainage channel.

Of your epiphany, she’ll later write, “They can now hear the roar of turbulent water in the ice tunnel, flowing fast enough to move boulders. The esker is speaking to them, sharing its memories.”

While eskers are a common landform in formerly glaciated landscapes such as those in southern Wisconsin, if you live in this area, you might never have seen one—but that’s not because they were never there. The esker Marcia takes her students to tells us why they’ve vanished. The quarry in the side of the esker’s hill takes

advantage of the subglacial river’s work to sort the sediment into deposits of sand and gravel that are valuable for construction. These have been so heavily mined that precious few remain in southern Wisconsin to tell us their story. The disappearance of these subglacial channels that once flowed beneath kilometers-thick ice sheets, thundering with heavy loads of boulders, gravel, and sand, demonstrates the immense power humans hold to act as a geologic force.

Bearing this in mind, Marcia leaves us with a parting message: We are all Earthlings, and being an Earthling means more than being human. Humans are not the only Earthlings—animals, plants, and rocks are Earthlings, too—and there are no boundaries between Earthlings; we are all united as cohabitants of our shared planet, with a shared lingua franca of the Earth. As Earthlings, we are each responsible for listening and seeing ourselves in relation to each other, and for acting with the knowledge that we are part of a system greater and more storied than ourselves, our species, and even our time.

Catie DeMets works to grow vibrant food systems and communities in collaboration with organizations across the US. She earned an MS in environmental studies from the University of Montana and a BA in geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University, where Marcia Bjornerud instilled a lasting philosophy of timefulness and geologic awe.

She was formerly the Wisconsin Academy’s Climate & Energy Initiative director and coordinator.

Rudy Molinek is a writer and host of the podcast Under Our Feet, where he explores stories of the inextricable links between humans and the earth in Wisconsin. He’s also a PhD student in geology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, researching the ancient ice sheets that once swept across the upper Midwest.

After meeting on a geology field course in Italy in 2014, Catie and Rudy got married last year in Spring Green, with Marcia in attendance as a lifelong mentor and friend to them both. They enjoy overambitious cooking projects, thinking and writing about big things together, and adventuring with their family and friends by land, snow, and stream.

The Wisconsin Academy is featuring Marcia Bjornerud as a speaker in a three-part series on the geology of Wisconsin, alongside other experts in the state. For more information and recordings of those talks, please visit wisconsinacademy.org/talks.

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WI

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Wisconsin Historical Society, B. Wolfgang Hoffmann, Allison and Hoffmann, 126626

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R. Bruce Allison, left, and B. Wolfgang Hoffmann pose in front of the massive trunk of a tree in 1979. Allison and Hoffmann collaborated as author and photographer, respectively, on the book Wisconsin’s Champion Trees.

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TREE CHAMPIONS

BY BILL BERRY

T

his is a story about Wisconsin’s Champion Trees Program, its rich history and encouraging revival. But first, some

wisdom from a great ecologist and conservationist.

When Aldo Leopold was fashioning his land ethic, in which he posited that people are members of a land community and have a duty to care for it, trees certainly entered into his thoughts.

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Photo courtesy of R. Bruce Allison

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Professional arborist R. Bruce Allison, shown here doing tomography research on a tree, has written several books on Wisconsin’s champion trees, along with trees of historical and cultural importance. Sonic tomography uses sound waves to assess tree health by providing a two- or three-dimensional image of the internal structure of a tree.

After all, trees are perhaps our closest neighbors in the land community. Huge swaths of Wisconsin are wholly or partly forested. The rest of the state is far from treeless. They line farm fields, dress up hillsides, thrive along rivers, and persevere in inhospitable environments like sand plains. Our urban communities are graced by trees that help cool sultry summer days and shield us from biting winter winds.

Many of us have distinct memories about our woody neighbors.

Maybe it’s the first tree climbed as a child, or a tree planted when a child was born or in memory of a loved one who has passed. Many find places of peace among trees, where we go to seek solitude. Trees provide food and shelter. They have vast economic value, from the frames of our homes to beautiful works of art. We know that trees play a huge role in mitigating climate change, even as they literally freshen the air we breathe. Forest ecologists today ponder the ability of trees to communicate and support one another, whether defending from drought, disease, or insect invaders or cooperating as members of a forest community.

Our closest neighbors, indeed.

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After the Leopold family bought a worn-out farm and surrounding land along the Wisconsin River in Sauk County in the mid-1930s, they set about planting trees and undertaking prairie restoration.

Some of the trees they spaded into the ground stand to this day, living champions of the land ethic, which takes us to the subject of Wisconsin’s champion trees.

It’s a feel-good story of trees and people who champion them, a story that is alive and well today, more than three-quarters of a century since it began. At virtually the same time Leopold was planting trees, one of his peers, beloved Wisconsin conservationist Walter Scott, undertook an effort to compile a record of Wisconsin’s largest trees.

Scott began his work in 1941. It was the birth of the Wisconsin Champion Trees Program, which has survived through thick and thin. Recently and after a lull, the Department of Natural Resources breathed new life into the program, adding some nifty bells and whistles that employ digital mapping and other tools that are helping to slowly but surely update and add to the list of champions while better pinpointing where they can be found. The department

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relies on trained volunteers to verify champions before adding the trees to a searchable database and interactive map.

But many volunteer inspectors are out there today helping update the state’s records and bring them into a more user-friendly format.

The state has 82 volunteer inspectors and is looking to grow that number. The DNR’s Champion Trees website include a page for would-be inspectors. It offers an online training program, but adds: “All inspectors will need to know is how to identify and measure a wide variety of trees.”

The DNR gets an average of seven or eight new champion nominations a month, says Becca Young-Fluur, a communications specialist who oversees the program. Chris Tall, another DNR employee who worked on the program, says the full database includes 1,663 nominations. The Champion Trees program languished for a time, but interest among tree lovers didn’t wane.

Since the program was updated and relaunched in April 2021, the agency has received 121 nominations. They have come from people in all walks of life, including a Girl Scout group that attended a presentation by Tall.

The response has been gratifying, says Young-Fluur. “Many people are saying they’re thankful the program is getting going again. It seems like the interest is very high. I personally haven’t sent out any notices, so it’s growing organically.”

It’s also growing with new technology. The champions database is now on ArcGIS, an online geographic information system; a smartphone app, Survey123, allows anyone to find listed champions by linking to that system. “Anyone can feed into the database now,” Young-Fluur says.

The DNR also has a searchable online map to accompany the new tools. With the help of inspectors, the old database is slowly but surely being updated. If the tree is still standing, inspectors update the measurements, and the tree becomes part of the searchable database.

Those volunteers include Tim Yanacheck of Oregon, Wisconsin, and Chad McGrath, who lives in Springstead in the northern part of the state, where he operates a nursery. They have been tree hunting since the 1980s and are among Wisconsin’s champions of trees. So is R. Bruce Allison, a professional arborist who lives in Verona and played a huge role in thrusting the program and the cause of identifying big trees into the public eye in the 1980s, researching and writing several books about champion trees, the state’s famous and historic trees, and the deep cultural connections many trees have with humans. He lives by a simple belief: “Trees need people, and people need trees.”

But the program started with Scott, a tireless state servant who had a hand in virtually every major state conservation effort here at a time of heightened concern about human impacts on nature.

Scott often worked behind the scenes while serving as assistant to the secretary of the Wisconsin Conservation Department, which became the DNR. His interests were many and varied, and he had enduring ties to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, including serving as the first editor of the Wisconsin Academy Review, forerunner to today’s Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine.

He was a mentor to many, including Allison, who noted in an interview, “In the 1940s, the American Forestry Association [now American Forests] had started a program called Record Trees.

Want to learn more about Wisconsin’s champion trees?

Do you have a tree you think is a champion?

Are you interested in becoming an inspector?

Visit the Wisconsin DNR’s Champion Trees website (dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/forests/championtrees) to learn more. While you’re there, be sure to explore the interactive map that gives precise information on where the state’s champions are located.

Their idea was if they brought attention to the largest trees, it would bring attention to the diversity, size, and remarkable assets of trees.”

Scott was on it in a flash, beginning to compile the state’s first list of champions in 1941. Remarkably, he continued to add to the list for four decades, until health problems paused the effort.

Enter Allison, a young, ambitious arborist with a similar love of trees. He sought out Scott, who lived with his wife, Trudy, at their Madison home in the Spring Harbor neighborhood. The home was dubbed Hickory Hill and was the site of many a social gathering, often linked to a conservation effort. Scott was in failing health when Allison visited him to seek guidance. His idea was to use the database to broaden interest in trees. “I wanted to get involved producing something in writing about some of the interesting things about Wisconsin trees,” Allison says.

Scott listened to Allison’s pitch, “and he said, ‘Well, fine. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’”

The next day, Scott asked, “Why do you want to do this?”

Allison replied, “I’m in the tree business, and when you’re in a profession, you have an obligation to share the knowledge base. I said, ‘Would you be able to help me?’ He said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’

I realized he was testing me.”

When Allison returned for a third visit, he got his reward.

“He took me out to his garage and flung open the door. There must have been twenty cardboard boxes of letters, newspaper clippings, whatever he had gathered about the champion trees of Wisconsin.

So I realized I had a big task. I ended up taking those and going through them.”

The torch had been passed. Thus began the great tree hunt.

Allison had become friends with photographer and videographer B. Wolfgang Hoffmann. The two set out to crisscross the state, tape

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Bill Berry

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Longtime champion tree hunters Tim Yanacheck, left, and Chad McGrath, with Stevens Point landowner Sandi Ticknor, measure a large silver maple.

Sandi and her husband Mark agreed to have the tree considered for the Wisconsin Champion Trees Program. McGrath and Yanacheck volunteer as verifiers for the program, which is overseen by the Department of Natural Resources.

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measure and other tools in hand, chasing down trees in Scott’s files and those from other sources. County historical societies came in handy along with another Wisconsin Academy connection. Robert Gard, a former president of the organization in 1977, University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension faculty member, and founder of the Wisconsin Idea Theater, wrote a letter on Allison’s behalf to UW Extension agents across the state, seeking their help. The replies were many.

Both Allison and Hoffmann had day jobs, but they worked around those and family responsibilities as they pursued trees. By 1982, they had enough solid material for Allison to publish Wisconsin’s Champion Trees: A Tree Hunter’s Guide, a succinct list of the top few trees among some 153 species, along with geographic locations; it was updated and reprinted in 2005.

Thanks to Gard’s help, Allison tapped the historical and cultural connections among trees and people for another book, Wisconsin’s Famous and Historic Trees, composed of narrative essays about trees that held historic and cultural significance. Other Allison books include If Trees Could Talk: Stories About Trees, a children’s book, and Every Root an Anchor, another book of narrative essays about historic and cultural connections among trees and humans.

As for the original database, when Scott was no longer able to manage it, a few other entities inherited it, including the Longenecker Horticultural Gardens at UW–Madison. The DNR took over management in the early 1980s. Thanks to Scott and Allison, the champion trees movement spread to other counties. Brown County, under the leadership of county agent Paul Hartman, published its own county guide. And scores of other people across the state were encouraged to go on tree hunts.

A few points worth noting: The designation “champion tree” doesn’t tell the whole story.

Champions are determined by a composite score of three measurements: height, canopy spread, and trunk circumference at 4.5 feet, all of which is fine but doesn’t take age into account. And when it comes to age, the biggest aren’t always oldest. As Wisconsin author John Bates notes in Our Living Ancestors, a book about the history and ecology of Wisconsin old-growth forests, white cedar trees clinging to dolomite rock faces in Door County may be less than fifteen feet tall but five hundred years old. Age notwithstanding, big trees have a powerful lure. The lessons they provide help us better understand our own place in nature.

Searching for champions can be bittersweet, as I learned when I undertook my own tree hunts during the pandemic. Champion trees from the original lists are often now ghosts, felled by wind, development, disease, or just old age. Even so, something magical often happened in my search, like coming upon a gorgeous stand of eastern cottonwood trees that regenerated naturally in a quiet park along the East River in Green Bay, just a couple of blocks from my childhood home. Those were champions in my mind.

While champion trees are distributed across the state, many are found in urban areas, towering over homes and city streets. It was on such a city street where I spent a pleasant summer afternoon with McGrath and Yanacheck, following them as they measured a massive silver maple at the home of Mark and Sandi Ticknor on Stevens Point’s north side. The tree hunters were joined by Stevens Point city arborist Paul Ziemann. The maple towered over

ESSAY

the Ticknors’ property and their hundred-year-old home, and they were clearly fond of it. Mark is tall and lanky, and he told of gathering with three other men of his stature to try to reach around the tree hand-to-hand. They couldn’t complete the circle. However, that afternoon Yanacheck and McGrath used a tape measure to accomplish the task.

The two were buddies at Carthage College in Kenosha. They went on to professional careers, Yanacheck as an attorney and McGrath as a clinical psychologist, health systems administrator, and writer.

A decade or so after their college days, they reconnected, and soon they were in the field together, chasing big trees. These days, they are helping the DNR to update its database, searching out trees from the original list. It’s gratifying work for the pair.

The Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula served as one of their favorite tree hunting spots. Its biggest trees include one of the largest remaining stands of hemlock trees in North America.

“That became a hunting ground for us, but it was also just a happy place for us to be tromping around, just being out in nature,” says Yanacheck, who was sometimes called upon to climb one tall tree to help spot another big one in the distance.

McGrath’s interest was born in graduate school. “I went for a walk one day in a park in DeKalb [Illinois] and noticed these giant trees.

I found out they were eastern cottonwoods,” he says. “I was hooked.

I started looking at trees in a new way, and I have ever since.”

They have memories of the trees they’ve measured, but the reactions from landowners they worked with are even stronger.

“There have been so many trees that they blend together,” Yanacheck says. “But I remember how, almost always, the owner of a tree responded so positively. … They would be so happy about it, proud as can be.” And there’s an important lesson, he adds. “If an older guy can show a grandkid the tree, it’s a reminder that this tree doesn’t belong to anyone, it belongs to everyone.”

McGrath has written several outdoor-themed books—guides to cross-country skiing and hiking trails—but trees have helped define his life, from those he nurtures in his nursery to sell at northern Wisconsin farmers’ markets to the state champion quaking aspen he identified in 2021, near Sayner, in the Plum Lake Hemlock Forest State Natural Area.

“Tim wasn’t on that discovery,” he says. “But he came up one day last summer, and we went over there to hike into the hemlock forest.

We got a quarter mile before we gave up. The deer flies were so bad.”

Aside from the personal connections many people have to trees, what about the rest of the story, say, the science?

Allison is keen on talking about that. “People are recognizing— with global climate change, the loss of the Amazon, and the decline of trees in our own yards due to new invasive pest species like the emerald ash borer, gypsy moths, hemlock woolly adelgid, and other challenges—that there’s a certain fragility about trees. There’s an appreciation for their contributions,” he says. “One of the easiest answers for excess [carbon dioxide] in the air is planting more trees.

Trees sequester that CO2. People today have a better appreciation for their importance.”

Others, like Mike Dombeck, former chief of the USDA National Forest Service and a resident of the Stevens Point area, add that existing stands of old-growth or mature trees are even better at sequestering than younger forests. He has argued in publications

like the New York Times that we need to preserve these older intact forest systems for our own good.

Then there’s the simplicity of how trees and humans interact on a physiological level. “We breathe in the oxygen they release, and they take in the CO2. It’s a remarkable closed-loop system,” says Allison.

“We have total dependency on green living things for our nutrition and food. We cannot produce carbohydrates. They can.”

Science, Allison adds, continues to uncover new aspects of tree communities. He’s excited about recent findings by forest ecologists like Suzanne Simard, documenting a symbiotic relationship between trees and mycorrhizal soil fungi that attach to tree roots, serving as underground connectors between and among tree species. It’s a big story, one in which trees of all shapes and sizes are champions.

“We are in an environment where trees are affecting climate and our comfort, reducing soil erosion, and allowing us to find our place on the land,” Allison says.

Urban foresters have over the years been able to calculate the economic values of trees in cities. They are many. Trees help to filter air and water, control storm water, conserve energy, and provide animal habitat and shade. Oh, and they add to property values.

And then there’s the emotional value.

“The Champion Trees Program is emotion-based, and I don’t think the importance of emotion can be overstated,” Yanacheck says. “The emotion can be compared to how some cultures revere their elders. I think of the elders who came before us. That’s the presence of an old tree. They can’t get up and hide when danger comes, and eventually that elder tree dies. I have great respect for that living thing.”

Years ago, I was on a tour of Leopold’s shack and the forested land where it sits. It was a blustery day, and while we walked, a large limb came tumbling down. In that land community, when one tree tumbles, another captures more sunlight to help it thrive.

I’m happy that the Wisconsin Champion Trees Program has new sunlight, for the lessons trees teach us are many and important. We need trees, and trees need us.

Author and journalist Bill Berry lives in Stevens Point. He has written about the environment and conservation for more than five decades.

His previous work with the Wisconsin Academy includes serving as communications specialist for and author of the final report of the Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin project and producer of the Voices of Rural Wisconsin project, a partnership between Portal Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Academy. His 2014 book, Banning DDT: How Citizen Activists in Wisconsin Led the Way, was named the top nature book of the year by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.

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Essay

Sarah FitzSimons’ Field Sketch was a striking installation in the 2018 Wormfarm Institute’s Farm/Art DTour.

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Essay

CULTIVATING ART, AGRICULTURE, AND IMPACT IN SAUK COUNTY

BY SARAH E. WHITE

A

rt and agriculture aren’t usually thought of together. Typically, they’re seen as separate

as the urban and rural environments with which they’re often associated. But art and agriculture each produce fruit that sustains and enriches community. And a project begun in Sauk County in 2011 showcases both.

Sarah FitzSimons

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The Farm/Art DTour is a ten-day, fifty-mile, self-guided driving route laid out every other October that draws tens of thousands of visitors from around the Midwest to the edge of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region.

The tour meanders through rolling farmland and includes stops where visitors take in site-specific sculpture installations and pasture performances. Artist-built “roadside culture stands” are also set up, and eclectic restaurants, taverns, farm stands, and businesses dot the route, offering refreshments and a chance to take home fresh produce, locally made food, and crafts.

The driving tour offers artist- and community-led civic engagement that draws attention to Wisconsin’s unique agricultural landscape and affirms the commonalities and interdependence of the so-called red and blue spheres in American life.

There is much more going on here than a quirky country drive, and the area enjoys lasting impacts from the interdisciplinary event.

PLANTING THE SEEDS OF CREATIVITY The Farm/Art DTour is the brainchild of the Wormfarm Institute, founded in 2000 by artist/farmers Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas.

What began as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) vegetable farm in the town of Reedsburg grew into a nonprofit that works to build a sustainable future for agriculture and the arts.

Wormfarm’s public-facing activities include the biennial DTour, Fermentation Fest, and Test Plots—nimble projects used to explore new collaborations for future DTours. Test Plots take their name from the designated parts of a field where farmers experiment with new crops and techniques. Meanwhile, CSA farming continues, and Wormfarm hosts artists-in-residence throughout the growing season.

The DTour began in 2011 as an annual event, then in 2016 moved to every other year. From 2011 to 2018, the route looped through northern and then central Sauk County. In 2020 and 2022, the DTour followed a new route to the south. Different routes are selected every three years to spread the economic impact and opportunity for collaboration within the county.

Planning the DTour is a complex process, one that reflects the ideas, values, and cultural ambitions of its organizers in ways that have won the respect of participating artists and national funders.

Wormfarm handles calling for submissions, jurying the proposals, and matching the selected artists with landowners. The steering committee helps with on-the-ground logistics and community relations. Hundreds of volunteers are involved over the two-year planning cycle, and dozens of businesses contribute material and financial support.

SETTING THE TABLE As Salinas and Neuwirth’s involvement in Sauk County grew, Salinas coined the term cultureshed to represent their burgeoning concept. Leaning on the ideas of a watershed and a foodshed, a cultureshed is “an area nourished by what is cultivated locally” with the broadest possible understanding of “cultivate.”

Stakeholders in the cultureshed through which the DTour passes include farmers and other landowners, artists, residents, nonprofit organizations, and urbanites eager to build bridges between the rural experience and their own arts and culture. They find common

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cause in their desire for healthy places with sustainable land use and thriving livelihoods for local producers and consumers.

“Wormfarm sets the table by bringing all these interests together,” says Philip Matthews, Wormfarm’s director of programs.

Dale Jaedike, a member of the 2022 DTour steering committee, is the sixth generation of his family to steward land in Sauk County.

He hosted artwork on his farm in 2020 and 2022 and appreciates the synergy the DTour creates between landowners, artists, and visitors.

“These artists are designing their work for a specific site, letting it influence their creative process,” he says. “It’s nice to give people an opportunity to come out and see the landscape, appreciate the art, get to know the artists in some cases, and interact with the residents. It’s synergistic.”

Sara Daleiden, an artist and founder of MKE<->LAX, an initiative with twin bases in Milwaukee and Los Angeles, experienced that synergy on an early visit to the DTour.

“The tour always feels very cinematic to me,” she says. “You’re in this autumn landscape, the rolling hills, the moving car—it’s more than the actual stops. It’s the restaurants and shops on the main streets of the towns, the weather, the landowners and the art installations, the roadside culture stands with vendors. They’re all celebrating the creative and cultural economy.”

ARTISTIC COLLABORATION DONE RIGHT Rural places can often seem on the periphery of the art world, so doing things differently comes naturally when you are so far from the urban centers of artistic influence. The Farm/Art DTour is an unusually collaborative process, rooted in the uniquely local, creating an example of ethical power-sharing and respect for creators.

For artists, an important distinction between the DTour and other public arts initiatives is in its process of selecting and commissioning the artwork.

A national call for proposals goes out in the December preceding the tour. The request for proposals is open to both formally trained and self-taught artists. Proposals are reviewed by a jury and selected through a two-step process.

Applicants first submit a preliminary project concept. Up to fifteen finalists are invited to attend a two-day orientation in Sauk County, travel the DTour, and meet landowners. With a stipend, the finalists develop a full site-responsive proposal for a second round of jury review. From that group, up to ten artists are selected. They receive funding ranging from $2,500 to $10,000 to realize their installation.

“It’s great to only have to do a preliminary ideation, and then to actually get support to develop your proposal further,” says Austen Camille, an interdisciplinary artist whose work appeared on the 2022 tour. “Often, as a person working in public art, you are asked to develop everything, put it all on the table upfront, and hope for the best. Finding organizations that treat artists ethically as workers is a rarity. Wormfarm does a good job of democratizing the art process.”

Camille first came to Wormfarm as an artist in residence in 2015.

“You garden, alone with your thoughts, and your thinking starts to revolve around the land,” she recalls of her experience. “You go to your studio and distill that into something. Then you sit down to

Katrin Talbot

Katrin Talbot

Sarah White

Essay

Austen Camille’s When the Cows Arrived by Boat, Passenger Pigeons Still Traveled the Skies brought past, present, and future conceptions of the Sauk County landscape together in one experience.

The interactive augmented-reality installation invited engagement via a QR code linking to an online component. In the story that unfolds in that animation, she emphasizes continued soil health and biodiversity as the climate changes. “I wanted it to be more helpful than climate dire,” she says. Watch a video at youtube.com/watch?v=ayeoI-C07Q0

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Sarah FitzSimons

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From the road, Sarah FitzSimons’ Field Sketch looked like a pencil drawing silhouetted against the sky. Actually, the three-dimensional “sketch” of a farmhouse and outbuildings was made from tent poles and custom-welded joints. “I wasn’t sure if anyone would get out of the car,” FitzSimons recalls.

“But after two or three days, there was a path worn through the front door. Everyone wanted to play along with the illusion. I loved seeing how people interacted with it.”

dinner with the other artists, eat glorious food that you’ve grown, and talk. It feels cyclical and holistic.”

The next year, Camille interned on the DTour. “I loved being a part of that process from the organizational side, connecting with the farmers, learning the landscape, speaking to people on the route, and getting to know the artists who were being brought in,” she says. Her interactive installation, When the Cows Arrived by Boat, Passenger Pigeons Still Traveled the Skies, for the 2022 tour was inspired by the relationship she’d formed with the landscape itself.

Flexibility is essential in such a multi-sided collaboration: While Camille’s piece had been designed for a specific site, with cut-outs intended to align with views of specific bluffs, at the last minute that site fell through. Overnight, landowner Dale Fingerhut, who had participated in the 2020 DTour, agreed to host the installation on his farm, and Camille and Fingerhut became lasting friends through the experience.

Sarah FitzSimons is an artist who combines sculpture, photography, and video in her work. She teaches sculpture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she often requires students in her sculpture and installation class to visit the DTour

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and write a review of it afterward. A DTour artist in 2018, FitzSimons also has participated in similar temporary, site-specific art events, mostly in Europe, where state and local funding for tourism often helps underwrite the costs.

“This is not a show that travels from one museum to another. It’s non-commercial; the work is not for sale,” she says of the DTour.

“This is rooted in the local, and I think there is something valuable there, especially in this era of giant biennials where the work travels around the world. Here, it’s a different type of density than going to a museum and seeing one piece after another.”

Several years after her turn as an artist, FitzSimons was invited to be a juror. Her experience with DTour’s outdoor installations helped her curate proposals that were feasible for the Wisconsin landscape. And she agrees that the application process sets the DTour apart from most group show processes.

“Even the artists who aren’t ultimately chosen have still gotten a valuable experience, which is getting your expenses paid to visit the area and to meet the other artists,” she says. “Wormfarm wants it to have value for everyone involved, and I definitely appreciate that.”

Katrin Talbot

Essay

In performances repeated over the two weekends of the 2022 tour, The Giant Farmer of Plain harvested dancing vegetables (constructed and performed by youth from area grade schools). Artist Christopher Lutter-Gardella was embedded with Kraemer Brothers during design and construction of the piece.

Many people from the village assisted with labor and material donations, and River Valley High School art students helped create the farmer’s clothes, which were made from the polyethylene fabric used for hay bale covers. Community members from Plain and fellows from the Aldo Leopold Foundation volunteered to animate the puppet. Watch a video at youtube.com/watch?v=KcEAtv1ORUM

DEMONSTRATING A THRIVING AGRICULTURAL FUTURE One of the larger goals of the Farm/Art DTour is to raise awareness about the rural environment in which it takes place. Key to this goal is Wormfarm’s new collaborator, the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit environmental organization working to advance agroforestry in the Midwest. Environmental sustainability is the common ground on which the two organizations meet.

“Agroforestry requires us to think differently,” says Jacob Grace, communications project manager for the Savanna Institute, which recently purchased four farms near Spring Green to develop as demonstration sites. Agroforestry is an intensive system that combines the growing of fruit and nut trees or shrubs, and even timber crops, with production of pasture, livestock, and often annual row crops.

Wormfarm has provided a warm welcome through connections with the Sauk County community. “I appreciate that Wormfarm is making an effort to do projects that aren’t just interesting to people driving in from outside the county, but also interesting to people

who are neighbors,” says Grace, adding that many of them are multigenerational family farmers.

Sauk County agriculture features a mix of conventional farming and innovative approaches like agroforestry. The DTour collaborates with landowners from all perspectives; Wormfarm is neutral in stance.

“We’re not judging one form of farming versus another,” says Wormfarm’s Matthews. “All of this exists in this county. The DTour invites visitors to consider the full picture, then asks—what do you make of it?”

“Most of the landowners in this area have been here for generations,” Jaedike observes. Regardless of their current approach to farming, “they have the mindset of good stewardship. The DTour showcases our efforts to see that it’s here for the future.”

Dan Enge grew up on a farm on Highway C in Sauk County. Now, he and his wife Jacque provide fresh produce to the community through their end-of-driveway farm stand and at area farmers’ markets. Their family’s twelve-hundred-acre farm is also a working dairy farm, milking about six hundred cows and employing over a dozen people.

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DRIVING ECONOMIC IMPACT

The next opportunity to drive the Farm/Art DTour is October 5–14, 2024.

In the meantime, the Wormfarm Institute and the Savanna Institute host a variety of events.

Learn more at wormfarminstitute.org and savannainstitute.org

“We like vegetable farming,” Jacque Enge says, “but we know that someday, we’re not going to want to spend our summers bending over the gardens.” The Enges are planting nut and fruit trees that will help them transition to a more perennial, regenerative approach to farming through crop species that live longer than two years without the need for replanting. They believe their approach will be healthier for the land and provide a better lifestyle for the farmer.

“To my mind, the Enges represent a pivot point, with one foot in the present and one in the future,” says Matthews.

As part of the 2022 DTour, Dan and Jacque Enge hosted a symposium in which they shared their enthusiasm for growing fruit- and nut-producing trees. The event had a larger goal beyond demonstrating agroforestry. Dan Enge was a member of a working group for the 2022 tour, which addressed how to help offset the environmental impact of auto traffic generated by the tour. They decided to integrate information about carbon sequestration into the program. “It’s not like our tree planting completely offset all those cars’ fossil fuel exhaust, but it gave us a chance to educate,” he says.

And the DTour has shown that the rural environment is itself a “work of art” that is as important as the temporary installations, and it’s sparked an exciting ripple effect across the area.

“Over the years, the temporary has led to the permanent,” says Matthews. “The DTour has led to the creation of a new public art park, a winery, a pickle shop, the Hill & Valley Exploration Tour, and other assets that invigorate this rural place.”

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When visitors ponder the economics underlying the Farm/Art DTour experience, the questions arise: What are the costs and benefits to people who own a piece of the cultureshed? Are the farmers and businesspeople seeing a lasting impact? The village of Plain offers a partial answer.

Plain, with a population of about eight hundred, has been a trailhead for the DTour since 2020. Ray Ring, who returned after a corporate career to raise his young family in his hometown, has served as village president since 2011. “I look for ways to make a small community like Plain thrive versus just survive,” he says.

Ring was delighted when the DTour route shifted to include Plain.

The village’s Strassenfest, a street festival showcasing local businesses, takes place in the first week of October, overlapping with the DTour. “It gives people coming to the tour a look at what the village has to offer,” he says.

Plain is also home to Kraemer Brothers, a commercial construction company that has been a thriving business anchor for more than seventy-five years. Kraemer North America grew out of that company to become a large-scale civil works contractor with operations in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington. General Engineering, an engineering and architectural services firm, is another major local company.

“We’re fortunate to have large companies here that are philanthropic,” Ring says. “They’re willing to help with projects the village wants to do,” including playing crucial supporting roles in the DTour.

As president and civic booster, Ring was essential in building excitement and buy-in for The Giant Farmer of Plain, one of the most popular art installations of the 2022 tour.

The bones of the idea came from a seventeen-foot walking skeleton that sculptor Christopher Lutter-Gardella had activated during the 2020 tour: Suspended from an extendable forklift provided by Kraemer Brothers, the artist and a team of professional puppeteers animated the skeleton from the ground via a system of ropes and pulleys.

When Lutter-Gardella and Wormfarm approached the leadership of Plain to host a community-built artwork in 2022, the committee remembered the skeleton performance and liked the idea of a new giant puppet being built.

“A farmer just made sense,” Ring recalls, “and building it gave a flavor of the importance of the construction businesses here.”

During a year-long collaboration with Wormfarm and the village, Lutter-Gardella, who refers to himself as a “designer, sculptor, theater-maker, and community educator,” worked with Kraemer Brothers carpenters and metal fabricators to create the spectacular twenty-foot homage to farmers. Ring estimates that over three thousand visitors attended the puppet’s performances.

After the tour ended, rather than see the puppet dismantled, Ring arranged to have it become the property of the village. Ring approached General Engineering to design an Adirondack chair for the farmer, and Kraemer North America manufactured it. Now the giant farmer sits at the entry to the village on Highway 23.

And Plain isn’t the only community benefitting from the DTour.

Positive effects are broadly distributed, bringing money and atten-

General Sherman’s Footprint, a 2022 piece on Dale Jaedike’s land, was created by artist Catherine Schwalbe.

Assembled from wooden lathes and painted white, the work outlines the footprint of the world’s largest tree, a sequoia from Northern California.

A poem by Jennifer Dotson could be read by walking the circumference.

Over the ten days of the event, performances—including a poetry reading and dance—were held inside that circle.

Dale Jaedike

Katrin Talbot

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Regina Flanagan

Regina Flanagan

Jacque Enge

Jacque Enge

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The tree-planting symposium drew several dozen participants who helped plant a half acre of food-producing trees.

“I get emails from people asking if they can come to visit the trees they planted,” Jacque Enge says. “The experience was that significant” for those who came, saw, and planted.

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tion into the rural villages and towns along the route. Many farmers see increased sales at their roadside produce stands, as do local restaurants, businesses, and inns. The impact even reaches urban centers as well.

Since 2015, Rural Urban FLOW, which celebrates the interwoven roles that artists, farmers, advocates, and other creators play in sustainable land stewardship, has arranged to bring groups of people from Milwaukee to the DTour.

“It took a very specific invitation to entice urban dwellers to come see what the tour was about,” says organizer Sara Daleiden.

“We had people on that bus of all different ages, races, ethnicities, genders—artists, farmers, small business owners, and other creative leaders. The visit to the DTour is an example of the land exchanges that are a core value of Rural Urban FLOW.” More recently, the group has piloted a Milwaukee version of the DTour, and plans are in the works for bringing rural members of the FLOW network from Sauk County to the Milwaukee tour.

SYNERGY FEEDS RURAL VITALITY The Farm/Art DTour was conceived as a celebratory free public event that would engage visitors with the landscape and the people in it. Collaborators hope that increased awareness of the synergy among what is cultivated locally, from temporary art installations to perennial farming, will result in sustained positive change.

Visitors come out to see art but find themselves engaged in a more far-reaching conversation. Not only do they enjoy encounters with thought-enriching sculptures in a scenic landscape, but they also gain an appreciation for an agricultural economy negotiating the juncture between tradition and innovation.

Wormfarm Institute hopes that by enriching the cultureshed with excursions like the Farm/Art DTour, and spreading their impact through Rural Urban FLOW, Wisconsinites from across the urban/rural continuum will find inspiration and connection.

“Just come and see,” says Matthews. “Bring your curiosity and an open mind.”

On view at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts 201 State St., Madison

MARY BURNS

Women of Water: Woven Portraits from Around the World

MADELINE GRACE MARTIN Of Words and Trees: A Collaboration with My Father PAIRED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

NOVEMBER 24 – FEBRUARY 4, 2024 ARTISTS’ RECEPTION Saturday, December 2, 2023 - 6:00 to 8:00 pm Artists’ remarks at 6:30 pm ARTIST’S TALK WITH MARY BURNS Thursday, January 11, 2024 - 6:00 to 7:00 pm Online with advance registration POETRY READING WITH ANGELA TRUDELL VASQUEZ AND MADELINE GRACE MARTIN Saturday, January 20, 2024 - 3:00 to 4:00 pm In-person and online with advance registration Learn more and register at wisconsinacademy.org/gallery

Sarah E. White is a freelance writer and personal historian. She helps people write about their lives and work from her home base in Madison.

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@ Watrous Gallery

WOMEN OF WATER WOVEN PORTRAITS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Left: Mary Burns, Nafisa Barot, India. Activist, 2017–2023. Hand-woven cotton jacquard, 42 x 31 in. Right: Mary Burns, Mildred “Tinker” Schuman, Lac du Flambeau, WI. Water-walker, Poet, Educator, Ojibwe Elder, 2017–2023. Hand-woven cotton jacquard, 42 x 31 in.

Mary Burns’ weavings celebrate and honor water and the women who work with it and advocate for it. She began this project in 2016, inspired by Indigenous water protectors and the awareness that water is often closely tied to women’s roles in traditional cultures.

Over time, Burns’ project expanded to embrace a wider group of women—scientists, activists, teachers, farmers, and healers—all of whom hold deep connections with water. The women featured in her beautifully rendered weavings span the globe, from Wisconsin to the Arctic Circle, from Mozambique to Honduras, from Sri Lanka to Peru, and from the North American Great Lakes to the African Great Lakes.

In developing these pieces, Burns worked with the women, their families, and their organizations to tell their stories.

Her decision to represent them in weaving, a medium often stereotyped as “women’s work,” reflects the often-underestimated power and importance of women’s contributions to water advocacy and science.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Mary Burns, Donnata Alupot, Marie Claire Dusabe, Diane Umutoni, African Great Lakes.

Scientists, 2017–2023. Hand-woven cotton jacquard, 42 x 31 in.

MARY BURNS

Mercer

Mary Burns is an award-winning fiber artist and master weaver. She crafted the works for Women and Water as well as Ancestral Women, an earlier exhibition that featured woven portraits of an elder from each of Wisconsin’s twelve Native tribes, on her digital jacquard hand loom. Mary creates custom-designed weavings and wall pieces in addition to felting, natural dyeing, and eco-printing. She has participated in numerous science and art collaborations, as well as artist residencies. Since 1984, Mary and her family have lived in her grandparents’ home in northern Wisconsin.

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@ Watrous Gallery

OF WORDS AND TREES A COLLABORATION WITH MY FATHER

Madeline Grace Martin, There Are So Many Things, 2023. Pine cone scales, acrylic, pencil, 10.5 x 10 in. each.

A portrait painter and multidisciplinary artist, Madeline Grace Martin honors the lives of community members and family in her work. For this exhibition, Martin builds upon the work that her father began, creating visual art to accompany his writing. This new body of work reflects upon the roles Peter Martin occupied, as a father, husband, boxer, writer, social worker, teacher, and planter of trees.

Created in a rich variety of media, Martin’s artwork gives new life to her father’s words. Several pieces, made by cutting the titles of his poems and stories out of black paper, curve and spin delicately in space, suggesting the inexact quality of memory. Mandalas of pinecone scales collected from the trees he planted radiate in circles, the ripples and currents offering evidence of his once physical presence.

“This show is a visual representation of healing and mystery, of asking questions that may not have conclusive answers,” writes Martin. “How do we repay our elders? How do we honor our parents? How do we stay connected to those who have died? Can art-making heal loss?”

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@ Watrous Gallery

Madeline Grace Martin, Once Something is on a List it’s Not So Easy to Lose (detail), 2023. Installation of hand-cut paper, approx. 120 x 72 in.

MADELINE GRACE MARTIN

Milwaukee

Madeline Grace Martin is an artist and educator. She creates work using watercolor, embroidery, pencil drawings, and hand-cut paper to honor intergenerational and community stories. Madeline received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2019 and is an artist-in-residence at Scout Studio and Gallery. She lives in the Merrill Park neighborhood with her partner and three children.

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Fiction

2023

Fern M. Lomibao

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MUSIC APPRECIATION FOR DEAD PEOPLE

BY MAT T CASHION

W

hen I started this final exam reflection/exit essay (which I wonder if you’re even reading) I dialed up the Brahms Alto Rhapsody you played

early this semester which you said was so beautiful it made some suicidal writer change his mind, so I gave it another chance thinking I’d missed something, and guess what? It still sucks. So I changed it up and started listening to what my twin brother was playing when I found him, which I’m not even going to tell you what it was. You wouldn’t appreciate it. You’d probably have a spasm like you did that day when somebody asked what you thought of Lil’ Nas, who, you know what? was at least trying some new things unlike some professors who probably repeat the same boring-ass lecture for forty years, keeping to the script from two thousand years ago when the killer B’s as you called them (Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach—to which I would add Bon Iver) were making the crowds go wild. This is my final final exam/reflection/ exit essay ever because after much reflection I’ve decided to exit this college, which is a decision you helped me solidify. I appreciate it.

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What you really want to hear is how everything you played really opened our eyes, but the truth is I didn’t appreciate anything about your mix. Music without a drumbeat is impossible to tap your foot to. Maybe I missed something during those two weeks I was out, but I doubt it, not that you noticed my absence. Not that you even replied to my email where I said I’d be absent, which would have been nice, just to have that little bit of human interaction, but maybe you never reply to anyone’s email, which is par for the course here at this prestigiously mediocre state institution. Ha. Par for the course. Good one, Rylie. Thanks.

I was out two weeks because I got Covid on purpose so I could sell my plasma.

My Dad’s idea. He said if I got it, I could make a lot more from the plasma. Which is funny because when I was a kid, he called me “Hypo,” short for Hypochondriac, because I was constantly worried about germs and also whether I’d get diabetes from having a sip of Diet Coke. And I figured if I got Covid, at least I’d have some excused absences under my belt.

The sad part is that I had a hard time getting it because I couldn’t get close enough to anyone. I never met people who knew people who threw parties. I’m not good at talking, and if I ever get out of my comfort zone to even try to talk to someone new, I like a friend beside me, like my roommate, but he lasted three weeks before he went home. My brother and I were supposed to be roommates, but then I got stuck with this guy who was the filthiest person on the planet, he never cared about reducing his body odor or doing any chores to help with cleanliness, so I’m the one who vacuumed, swiffered, and wiped down everything while he played Mortal Kombat and listened to Scream Metal, his favorite album being “You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter” by a band called I Set My Friends on Fire. My favorite track is “Reeses Pieces, I don’t know who John Cleese is?” which is more upbeat, and it doesn’t matter that I also don’t know who John Cleese is. His other favorite band was Sharks in Your Mouth, in particular the song “I Killed the Prom Queen” on the album “Music for the Recently Deceased (tour edition),” which you would last about one second with if you were accidentally exposed to this genre is my guess. He said it got him through his days, which I appreciated. Then he got Covid and went home and I missed him. Remember when you said nobody listens to albums anymore? My ex-roommate listened to albums and my brother was listening to an album in his car when I found him, an actual CD because the old car my dad got for him had a CD player in it, which you can’t find anymore. I’m not even going to mention what album it was.

That day you devoted to the 1960’s when you played Jimmy Hendricks doing his Star Spangled Banner thing was okay, but then you saw some people covering their ears and somebody asked what drugs he was on and you said maybe the problem was that we weren’t doing enough drugs. Which is where I think you could do some reflecting yourself and see whether you want to say things like that or not because that’s how my brother died, an overdose, so that was something else I didn’t appreciate. My parents want to believe it was an accident, but I knew him better and saw it coming. He hated school more than anyone in history, and here he was about to go to college, which he hated the thought of, but he didn’t want to stay home either, and then his girlfriend broke up with him and started trashing him on snapchat, and then he got kicked out of the band he’d been playing drums with which he took really hard because that’s all he wanted to do forever was to be a rocknroll drummer. Maybe he wasn’t good enough at that point or maybe the other guys didn’t like him much, I don’t know, he never said.

So I had a hard time getting Covid, but Dad said “be persistent.” I sat closer to people in the cafeteria, and bingo, fevers and chills for a couple days, then I was pretty sure I was going to die (even though my mom promised I wouldn’t), and then I recovered and started selling plasma and made $400 after just two donations which wasn’t enough to pay for college and I knew my Dad was taking out extra loans, which was a lot of money to pay for me to be so miserable, so I started thinking I should drop out and help Dad, which would help Mom too because she

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was exhausted and she’d been crying nonstop, but I didn’t want to go back to our tiny town either.

One of the things that killed my brother off was how Dad lost his right hand in a piece of farm machinery, which was my brother’s fault. He didn’t lock the combine header when Dad crawled underneath it to pull out a rock.

It was almost dark and Dad couldn’t see the blades were still spinning, and Aaron never heard him, or he was daydreaming, I don’t know. I ran his hand back to the house and Mom dropped it in a bucket of ice and drove us all to the hospital, which is a period of time I wouldn’t mind forgetting. Dad took it surprisingly well, considering, but then another thing that killed Aaron off was how Dad went around the farm saying “Lend me a hand.” It was funny the first time, but not the next ten thousand times. Aaron wanted to forget about it too and move far away but he fell in love with drugs instead is my theory.

When I got to campus the first day, I felt like a sign was stuck to my face saying “Hick Alert” and I know some of that was my own imagination turning against me, but not all of it. I started thinking I smelled like cow shit.

Our town is so small it’s not even a town, it’s a village. I didn’t meet anyone else who came from such a small place or whose parents had never gone to college and hearing my roommate who was from Milwaukee talk to his friends made me feel more alone. Even my freshman comp teacher made me feel bad after I wrote an essay about all the stereotypes I was hearing about farm kids and how I was tired of being pigeon-toed, which is where she put three laughing emojis in the margin. Here’s a confession: you know when you required us to attend the symphony? I didn’t go. Maybe if you had bought my ticket and also bought me some new clothes and a car I would’ve gone, but probably not even then.

Drake. That’s what he was listening to. I don’t know why I was scared to mention it. It’s not like you’ve even made it this far and it’s not like you’ve even heard of Drake. I won’t bother telling you what album it was.

I’m surprised I made it to the end of this first semester because I wanted to leave the moment my folks dropped me off. You know what was playing during move-in day? Whoever’s in charge of that mix needs to get fired asap. Because Journey? “Separate Ways?” Followed by “Who’s Crying Now?” While all the parents are losing their shit and the kids are about to be abandoned? Unless they were trying to be funny. But no one was laughing, and it felt like it was going out to all the grandparents in the crowd so they could recognize something from the previous century that would make them feel like everything was going to be okay.

So there’s Dad, blubbering away, wiping his nose with his stub, standing next to his truck with the door open after we’d made three trips up three f lights of dorm stairs, though we got some help from volunteers wearing smiley-face shirts who were trying to help the mood by smiling and laughing and saying welcome, and after the last trip, my dad said, well, I guess that’s it then, which is more than he’d said over the previous three hours we’d been riding in his truck listening to his favorite CD of all time—his only CD, come to think of it—Hank Williams Sr.’s greatest hits, which, I have to admit, kind of grew on me. Hank had women-troubles, money-troubles, homesick troubles. His bucket had a hole in it. I looked up some other songs he did as Luke the Drifter, which I made the mistake of sampling for my roommate. He didn’t appreciate it. He laughed and started talking in a ridiculous southern accent, then made a big show of putting on his noise-canceling headphones so the screaming could be closer to his brain.

After I hugged Mom and Dad goodbye, I reached into the truck and hugged my dog, which was the hardest thing. He’d made the trip with us, of course—Hank, we’d named him, after Williams, because that’s who Dad was playing that Christmas

JUDGE’S NOTE

DEBRA MONROE “Music Appreciation for Dead People” depicts a young man’s grief over his brother’s death—grief that seems inexpressible while his father and mother are still devastated. Its hypnotic prose rhythms evoke a lowdown state of mind that’s less a rut than a preferred groove, a limited set of notes with which to improvise. This story appropriates the formal conventions of a college essay exam for a course in music appreciation and, as it purports to be a darkly hysterical misfire of a final exam in which the protagonist argues that art can’t capture what we feel, the story captures what he feels, a confounding medley of passion, rage, bewilderment, sorrow. A strikingly original story.

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morning ten years ago when he brought in this puppy through the back door who ran straight toward us and jumped all over us, but also after Hank Aaron because my brother’s name was Aaron and because Dad told us how Hank Aaron played in Milwaukee before going to Atlanta. Hank was supposed to be for both of us, but he stuck to Aaron from the get-go. Afterward, he slept with me. He raised his head every time he heard a noise like Aaron might be coming home, so I felt extra bad for him having to go home without me.

That Drake album is called “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.” There was one song on there called “Used To,” featuring Lil’ Wayne, which I never want to hear again. He’d driven his car to the far side of the corn field next to our pond, this was early August, and the corn was already head-high and I found him there on a Sunday morning after my mom had made a big breakfast for us, pancakes and maple syrup, and when he didn’t come down, I went out and walked around and found him.

A month later, they dropped me off, and Mom was blubbering (she never really stopped), because she was going to be on her own with Dad, keeping the books and seeing about the loans and doing a lot of work she didn’t want to do, and all I could think about at the time was I couldn’t wait for them to leave, but as soon as they left, I wanted them to come back.

If there was one day of class that helped the most with my decision to drop out it was that day you devoted to funeral music. Next semester, in addition to the useless textbook you required us to buy for 50 bucks, I’d recommend you pass around some anti-depressants so everyone can supplement their supply. And you should retitle the course “Music Appreciation for Dead People.”

A week after my roommate left, someone started peeing outside my dorm room door. There was a nice little puddle in the hall I had to step over every time I went out. Maybe more than one person, I don’t know. Maybe word got out that I was a country-music-loving neat-freak everyone decided they should hate. So I spent more time in the library, camped out in a dark corner cubicle up on the sixth floor with my earbuds in and one night I saw this couple having sex up there which was depressing. They didn’t know I was there, I guess, or maybe they did and were doing it for my benefit so they could show me up close what I was missing out on during my college experience, and I was listening to Bon Ivers album “For Emma, Forever Go”, and about the time that couple started going at it is when “Skinny Love” came on, which now I can’t even listen to without thinking about that specific night in the library or that specific time in my life when Bon Iver kept me company. Justin Vernon, the singer, wrote that whole album while he secluded himself in his father’s hunting cabin which is about an hour from where I grew up, and he sings like he’s also suffering from severe isolation, so that’s an album I can appreciate.

One thing I got homesick for was my Dad’s terrible Mac & Cheese. He always put sliced up hotdogs in it, which I never appreciated at the time. I don’t mind the natural casing hotdogs that give you a little crunch, but the precooked squishy Oscar Mayer wieners were not my meat of choice growing up. Why contaminate perfectly good Mac & Cheese with an overly processed tube of meat with fillers and miscellaneous animal parts? I used to make fun of it, but then its funny what you start missing.

I ain’t felt the pressure in a little while It’s gonna take some getting used to Floatin’ all through the city with the windows down Puttin’ on like I used to They never told me when you get the crown It’s gon’ take some getting used to New friends all in their old feelings now They don’t love you like they used to man (Drake ft Wayne, Lil)

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Fiction

Dad made Aaron keep his drums in the hay barn, which is where he played every day after school (after chores) and then again after dinner for hours in the dark until Mom sent me out there to make him stop so we could go to bed, and it was around this time, in May of our senior year, when school was almost out, that he got more depressed and wouldn’t talk to me or anyone else, and no one knew what to do or what to say without him erupting like a lunatic, and we were all kind of afraid of him by then, and we thought, well, as long as we hear the drums coming from the hay barn, maybe he’s okay, and that summer they let him play out there all night in the dark if he wanted to, and by then, it was pretty amazing what he was doing—like he had eight arms and eight legs. He ran an extension cord out there and plugged in a stereo and started playing along with the greats like Bonham and Peart and Moon, but then he also played along with some jazz drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach, which is when I thought, wow, my brother is strange. But if you could’ve heard him out there—could’ve heard what was coming out of that barn through the darkness, you would have stopped in your tracks to appreciate it. You would have wondered where does Bonham stop and my brother begin?

Remember that day in class you got way off the subject and started talking about the Governor and how dumb he was for cutting the arts, which I can actually agree with, especially because of my brother, who I would say was an artist, but that was the same day you played Hendricks doing his thing, and maybe you were having a bad day based on how you went off on us for hating it and then you said we should be doing more drugs and how the Governor himself should drop some acid with our Chancellor so they could wake up a little, well, that struck a nerve at the time based on my brother’s experience so if your wondering who slid that angry note/letter under your office door, guess who? Which reminds me: The Guess Who. That one song you played from that band was okay: “Lonely feeling, deep inside, find a corner, where I can hide. Silent footsteps crowding me. Sudden darkness, but I can see.” And no sugar in their coffee or tea? I also don’t like sugar, so I appreciated that song.

If you ever met my brother, the first thing you would notice is that he’s a douche bag. The second thing you’d notice is that there’s a big room behind his eyes full of nooks and crannies where a special kind of music is playing that’s like it was made for only him which made it hard for him to hear anyone else. Then it’s like his music got louder after the accident. Because an awkward situation everybody wants to avoid in their life is to have a hand cut off inside a piece of farm machinery, especially if it’s your own son’s fault. Dad tried to make the best of it, tried to shoot left handed, but that put more pressure on me and Aaron to kill a deer we could put in the freezer. We both wanted no part of our annual deerhunting trips which Aaron made sure he was super-high for. High on hunting, he called it. I didn’t like hunting either. If I ever got a shot off, I made sure to miss.

Aaron missed on purpose too and Dad cussed at us, said we’d have to go hungry, but we knew there was always a surplus of Mac & Cheese with cut up hotdogs.

At the end of the first day of deer season, everybody meets in the only bar in town where the walls are over-populated with deer heads staring at you. Dad bought us beers which is legal if you’re a minor whose guardian is buying it for you (in case you don’t know about the state laws here, based on your accent I’m guessing your not from here), but I never liked the taste of beer. I didn’t like the gossip I heard there either. This one guy was always making fun of the Amish on the outskirts of town and he’d spread rumors about how they had sexual relations with their animals and he’d make it sound like you should feel sorry for the animals, but then I’d feel ashamed of myself for imagining such acts. These stories made me want to get away from there and go to college where I thought people wouldn’t spend so much time talking about other people, but I was wrong. I even had this one professor who liked to talk about his co-workers. It’s like he got bullied as a kid for being fat and had to return the favor for the rest

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Fiction

I have yet to see a final exam that measures the size of a human heart.

Maybe Brahms had a brother who died on him, maybe he put his broken heart into his piano and said let’s see what comes out the other side that someone else might find some comfort in ...

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of his life, which I don’t care how fat he is, but it showed me that even the most educated are no different than the least educated in their gossiping ways, and it was like I’m paying for this?

Mom would meet us at the bar, and she’d be drinking and trying to have fun too, and sometimes instead of making fun of me for not liking the beer dad ordered for me, she’d wait until he wasn’t looking and drink it for me. There was an old jukebox in there where people played the kind of country music I didn’t appreciate, but Mom played some classics I liked, her favorite being John Conley’s “Rose Colored Glasses” which made her sad, but she sang along with it too, which made her happy, along with it being around beer number three that put a certain look in her eyes like she wouldn’t mind having a different life. But there was something about his voice that got me too, something in there that felt more real than the other voices. You’d probably go off on a snob-filled lecture on what was wrong with it, but that song will always be a song that makes me think of those moments in the bar with my mom, who deserves some happiness.

If I’d had a date, I might’ve gone to the symphony. I never had a girlfriend and didn’t see any way I would ever get one. Being able to speak properly is a big quality to have in order to make someone fall in love with you. Some people can keep the conversation going by giving some weird facts or asking good questions. My brother was good at conversations so there aren’t those awkward silences, which is how he fooled us into thinking he was okay while he was really just fooling my parents into giving him drug money. But I never know what to say, and every single day in every class while people wait for the professors like you to start going blah, blah, blah, everyone’s looking at their phones and texting other people and never saying anything at all to the person who’s sitting right next to them and sometimes I would text my dead brother just to fit in. Some days I think I saw a look on your face like you could relate, but then class would start and the look got replaced with professor-face, which, if you want to do some reflecting, maybe you could think about too.

Being alone too long is bad for the brain. Some people are shy, so if you as a professor make someone feel bad after calling on them and asking them to say something and they never do, well, maybe that person needs more time to understand the question or maybe in addition to trying to stay awake they’re working a full-time job (which I’m guessing is something you didn’t have to do in college) and at that moment their brain is not available and they’ve already done a miraculous job of just getting out of bed and marching across campus in zero-degree weather while thinking about their dead brother and then they climb three flights of stairs to sit in a room around people staring at their phones and when they still don’t know what to say after the long pause you provide to enhance the embarrassment, you take it personally and enact some retribution along the lines of failing them when maybe you should reflect a little harder on how to say hello out there (and learn an actual name or two), are you okay?

Because maybe we’re not. Maybe we have things on our mind that you didn’t have on your mind when you were our age. When I was in Church one Sunday in 8th grade the priest decided to ask us what nightmares we’d been having lately and a four-year-old boy raised his hand and said “someone comes into church and kills us.” The whole congregation got silent. It’s like that kid’s childhood was dead at that point, and I think he killed mine too because that was the day I lost my faith. I don’t even remember what I was doing at the age of four, but it was most definitely not worrying about a church shooter. One nightmare I have is living at home for the rest of my life and coming home from a job I hate and seeing Mom in the kitchen where instead of saying “how was school” she says “how was work?” and me having even less to say.

I’m not a very social person, only having one close friend from home, Billy Preston, who I hardly talk to anymore because he says I’ve changed, which I guess is true, so I think he’s now a former friend which means I’m down to no friends. This

Fiction

semester, I’ve tried sticking my neck out in the realm of romance, and every time I get a feeling I might have found someone, I disappoint myself. I try to figure out what I do wrong, which leaves me feeling empty. There was never a day that passed over my entire first semester when I felt like, hey, I belong here, it’s such a cool place for people like me who have no fucking clue what they want to do and no interest in studying or going to a class to listen to some stale lecture or some terrible music I’m required to appreciate. Some say all first year students are on the same boat, but it doesn’t feel like it.

I have yet to see a final exam that measures the size of a human heart. Maybe Brahms had a brother who died on him, maybe he put his broken heart into his piano and said let’s see what comes out the other side that someone else might find some comfort in, I don’t know, but if it works for you, that’s great. People have different ways of dealing: screaming, coloring, running, taking drugs, drinking, listening to music, playing music. Writing? I’ve never thought about that one because I never thought I had much to say or that anyone would even want to listen, but I’ve been rambling here for awhile because it’s making me feel less depressed.

So all in all, this is me expressing my appreciation to you for giving me my best failure ever. I hope you’re able to reflect upon your own present failures and imagine a future that’s better.

Somehow, I picture you doing just that while all the dead musicians you exposed us to gather around your bed or couch or swimming pool, which makes me feel slightly better for some strange reason, like you could use some of their good company. I hope they help you. Good luck. I’m going to the barn now. I’m going to take a notebook out there and I’m going to lay it on top of my brother’s snare drum, and then I’m going to write something just for him that I know he would appreciate.

Editor’s note: This piece contains a handful of misspellings and grammatical errors. Writer Matt Cashion’s intention was to portray the narrator “as someone who is inexperienced in writing but who, nonetheless, is smart and imaginative and compassionate in ways that aren’t as easily measured in the ways on which teachers too often rely.”

Matt Cashion is the author of three books, including the novel Our Thirteenth Divorce, which won the 2017 Edna Ferber Book Prize, and the story collection Last Words of the Holy Ghost, which won the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize.

Born in the North Carolina mountains and raised in coastal Georgia, he earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. Since 2006, he has enjoyed hiking, biking, skiing, snow-shoeing, kayaking, and running through the beautiful Driftless Region of western Wisconsin. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

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Poetry

Award Winning Poetry from our 2023 Poetry Contest

2023

if I have an addiction to water, know that it’s hereditary i was baptized so many times, my family must not have understood its action as rebirth. instead: accumulation. each time we broke a new surface, raining holiness from drenched hair, we carried with us another layer—our hearts an orchard of candied apples rather than something cleansed and made new. now, everything is a baptism i never asked for. my face is born again with micellar water each morning. orzo noodles bob like so many submerged heads in the boil of my saucepan. every carwash feels like drowning, thrashing, waiting for a god i don’t believe in to let me breathe. what i didn’t know then, back when my mother glazed us with the blessing of each priest and pastor, with the reborn waves of the gulf coast and every drink she could swallow, is that water is beautiful because it erodes and she was so desperate to feel saved.

Taylor Kirby

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Taylor Kirby’s recent work appears in Salt Hill, Cream City Review, Booth, and as a Best American Essays 2021 Notable. She lives as close to Lake Mendota as she can and works as the program manager for Odyssey Beyond Bars at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Poetry

2023

Climate Passover Someday they will ask What were they thinking?

When the car is hurtling Off the overpass Towards the river What is the child in the backseat Thinking Except doors and windows?

We bought a canoe My husband and I And set it just outside the window.

Sometimes, at night, we practice How we will get the kids into it If the river comes hurtling up and over Past our doorstep.

I know what you’re thinking: How silly this all is.

But here’s a window into our thoughts: It’s not really a canoe.

It’s just a big green prayer For those too embarrassed to Spell out What they’re thinking On the door In lamb’s blood.

K. E. McCoy

K.E. McCoy’s poems have appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Speckled Trout Review, Riverbed Review, Willows Wept Review, and a few other journals without water-themed titles.

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Poetry

2023

My Son Standing Near a Glass of Water Tiny air bubbles pincushion the glass catching rainbows so perfectly full of light’s live hand touching also the hair and beard of the man he has become.

As he stands abstracted by what he hears through strands of earbuds invisible to me, this glistening listening fills my moment, an ordinary container bearing prisms so fleeting, I must look once again twice.

Sheryl Slocum

Sheryl Slocum lives in Milwaukee, where she teaches composition and English as a second language at Alverno College. Her poetry has appeared in many literary publications including the Wisconsin Academy Review, the former iteration of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Sheryl’s book, Leaving Lumberton (Wipf and Stock), came out in December 2022. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Hartford Avenue Poets.

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Poetry

JUDGE’S NOTES

NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

First Place

A poem that complicates salvation, “if i have an addiction to water, know that it’s hereditary” asks the reader to delineate the heavy symbolic weight of water, in both religion and secular space. I admire the weariness the speaker shares with this allegory of allegories.

This poem exhibits a profound understanding about the possibilities and desperations of recurring spiritual renewal, a renewal that is focused on what water can do in daily life.

Second Place

Escape for safety is the main theme of this poem, “Climate Passover,” as the speaker asks readers to consider an unconventional way a family can be safe. A canoe, a small boat known for summer relaxation, becomes an escape hatch to a better world.

Third Place

In “My Son Standing Near a Glass of Water,” the connection between water, children, and listening creates a meditative tableau on the flowage of time and its glittering music of temporal accompaniment.

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Book Review

Roze & Blud

by Jayson Iwen The University of Arkansas Press, 140 pages, $17.95 Reviewed by Anthony Bukoski

My friendship with Jayson Iwen precludes me from reviewing Roze & Blud, his poetry collection. However, I can introduce him to readers and in this way attract attention to his work.

The poet and essayist Barton Sutter says that to sell books a writer should have a dramatic life story to share. Jayson Iwen has such a story. After earning a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, then teaching at different colleges, he accepted a position at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, only to leave with his wife four years later when the country’s prime minister was assassinated.

Despite the political upheaval, Iwen’s time in Lebanon proved fruitful. His association with Huda Fakhreddine, now associate professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, led to their co-translating Lighthouse for the Drowning by Jawdat Fakhreddine, one of Lebanon’s most important poets and literary critics. In 2017, BOA Editions published Lighthouse, which appeared in the prestigious Lannan Translation Series. Now, Seagull Books in London has published Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson’s co-translation of Come, Take a Gentle Stab by Salim Barakat, a Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist living in Beirut.

Though leaving Lebanon must have been difficult, the next event—occurring years later and many miles away—provides something else for a life story. Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, chose Roze & Blud the winner of the 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, which included a $5,000 award and publication.

In a collection of poems that weaves characters together, Roze Mertha and William Blud live out their stories. Roze attends high school in Duluth, Minnesota, and lives in a trailer park. Just across the harbor, Blud, an ex-boxer, war veteran, and Great Lakes seaman,

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roams the windy streets of Superior, Wisconsin, regretting his fate.

Merzad, an Afghan immigrant living in the shabby room next to Blud’s, is another of the city’s dispossessed characters.

Roze and Blud never meet. However, their sensibilities converge in the middle of the book, in poetry shaped by loss and desire, by a desperate need to speak, by the rugged land, the weather, the maritime culture up there. In “Vessels,” Roze says about her and a friend, Though the ships are frozen in ice,/the winter sun warms our faces/when we smoke down by the docks./In winter we come to see what isn’t there. As if responding to Roze from the city across the river in Wisconsin, Blud remarks some pages later, I was beaten already/by the time I boarded my first ship/at the westernmost tip of Lake Superior.

You can almost hear him say her name.

Noble in their own ways, Roze and Blud join the people and places Jayson Iwen has written about elsewhere, in both poetry and fiction. By dreaming up these characters, by recognizing and ennobling them, he gives the Earth’s wanderers a home.

Anthony Bukoski of Superior is the author of the short story collection, The Blondes of Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021).

Book Review

The Clayfields

by Elise Gregory Cornerstone Press, 374 pages, $28.95 Reviewed by Jill Stukenberg

With rich characters at its heart, Elise Gregory’s debut novel The Clayfields entwines readers into its community and sings an ode to contemporary rural life. In this lush novel, Gregory paints unforgettable portraits: of Terra, transported by love to a second life on a modern farm, and of Lupine, an unusual teenager utterly at home, if alone. There’s also Etzel, a one-time German POW who dreams of the past, and Jason, who works, dangerously, toward a new farming future.

This novel-in-stories is told from multiple characters’ points of view, a form that—as fans of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and J. Ryan Stradal’s Kitchens of the Great Midwest will recognize—is an ideal choice to give voice to a community and tell the story of its interconnections.

Gregory skillfully divides character arcs across short, layered vignettes for a propulsive read. The narrative revolves around the community’s support for a newcomer after the sudden death of her husband. As the stories unfold, readers can see how various characters’ lives are affected by one another’s choices—and by their commitments to and care for one another.

The book is further ordered like an almanac, with sections labeled for seasonal moons. Gregory’s characters’ lives within, and knowledge of, their natural world make for another delight of the book.

Meet characters who hunt morels and craft artisanal cheeses and who know how a bit of wax applied to a teat will keep milk from dripping onto a 4H judge’s shoes.

Yet the world Gregroy creates is not limited to a romantic version of a past pastoral life. In The Clayfields, many churches have been converted to antique stores, the water is not always potable, grandmothers are not who we wish they would be, and we see that some labor without the safety of green cards.

At the same time, Gregory’s novel offers hope for rural life: It’s a place where a young couple can still buy land and make a future, on horseback if they wish; where a girl in a cornfield can be fully in charge of her own sexuality; and where two young women can reinvent the bake-off competition and maybe broaden some of their neighbors’ understanding of love.

Gregory is a Wisconsin writer and published poet from Pierce County, writing about contemporary Wisconsin people, in a novel published by a Wisconsin press. If the question is What does a sustainable literature look like?, then this book offers one satisfying answer.

Still, readers from anywhere will appreciate Gregory’s subtly powerful portrait of this community of humans, very much alive within a contemporary natural world, reckoning with the stunning thing that it is to care and to belong.

Jill Stukenberg, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, is the author of the novel News of the Air and co-editor of Midwest Review.

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Book Review JL Conrad

Recovery

by J.L. Conrad

Recovery

Texas Review Press, 43 pages, $16.95 Reviewed by Dale M. Kushner

A Poem

After the death of his mother, the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes recorded a note that eventually became his book, Mourning Diary. Barthes wrote: It is, here, the formal beginning of the big, long bereavement.

None of us escapes the long bereavement, but our response is individual, shaped by culture, temperament, and personal history.

One of poetry’s crucial functions is to illuminate the interiority of our emotional lives and to construct a bridge between the self (I-ness) and other (thou/world). Certain poets are called to this task. They act as translators of the unsayable and unspoken, those painful aspects of existence that are also archetypal and universal.

This is the domain of J.L. Conrad’s fearless chapbook, Recovery, an unsparing exploration of grief. The speaker in this long-sequenced poem has undergone an initiation through loss and speaks from the borderless territory in which the membrane between memory, dream, and ordinary time is porous.

Here, the non-rational world manifests in fractured images and flashes of conversations, displaying a protean ability to shape-shift.

Language, however, is an imperfect vehicle for conveying subjective experience, and if segments of Recovery appear cryptic, dotted with private symbology and recollections, it is because the author is dedicated to delivering with utmost fidelity the disjointed and slant reality one experiences in the grip of devastation.

This is all, in one way or another,/a conversation about the untranslatable,/

The experience of grief is untranslatable, but a fierce will to survive, to make sense of, to love the loss because it is one’s connection to the beloved demands that the poet, beset by chaotic memories and incomprehensible dreams, not abandon her task. To read Recovery with the expectation of being centered in chronological narrative time with its meaning-making reliance on cause and effect is to mistake that meaning can be deduced only by linear thinking rather than by the poetic imagination’s associative flow.

The first line of the opening passage, “The lungs are the seat of grief,” situates the speaker in bodily jeopardy. She is ailing. We are not told why, exactly, only that she has been altered; grief has transformed her. The following passages reveal an unfolding process of transfor-

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mation, and it is hard work. And yet Conrad pursues that elusive goal, deploying incantatory rhythm as an oblique form of prayer.

The initiation into purgatorial space is a descent; questions about the nature of reality and language arise. A short passage depicts the speaker and her son playfully engaged in the imagination’s capacity to transform reality.

My son and I pretend the sand along the curb Is quicksand, the fire hydrants dragons, the branches we find along the way magic wands.

The trees are candles, I am not used to making such concessions.

Such amens, such amendments.

Spring with its fangs and blossoms.

The closing image of fangs and blossoms alludes to the natural cycles of destruction and creation, death and rebirth. After the lighthearted moment with her son, the speaker rejects childish whimsy and the imagination’s capacity to transform anything.

What propels the reader onward is the intimacy established by the urgency of the speaker’s voice, her bravery in probing inarticulate yearnings. Loss and suffering are inclusive, a human concern.

As the poet Tess Gallagher has written, let us be strengthened by the wisdoms of our grieving.

Dale M. Kushner is a novelist, poet, and essayist.

She is the author of The Conditions of Love and a collection of poetry, M, and is currently finishing her next novel. Her scholarship of Jungian psychology informs her popular monthly online column for Psychology Today.

Book Review

Dear Weirdo

By Abraham Smith Propeller Books, 88 pages, $17.95 Reviewed by Lydia O’Donnell

Abraham Smith’s latest book, Dear Weirdo, consists of a vibrant 81-page long poem throughout which the reader experiences both Smith’s unique writerly voice and a chorus of countless voices across space and time. The characters in Smith’s poem are not only humans; animals also contribute to his poetic world. Reading Dear Weirdo feels like gazing at an ornate tapestry: one can focus on both the countless vivid details and the way they expand into one brilliant scene. The poem is saturated with Smith’s lyricism, characteristic humor, and occasional f lashes of tragedy. Yet it never loses the tenderness with which Smith’s poetry seems to approach life itself.

Much of Dear Weirdo reflects on the passage of time and its effects on individuals and society. The poem begins with the lines: pick up a stick these days and it’s snakes/and here it turns out we’ll be just shy/of eternally gone/almost always have been. Time in Smith’s world is not a linear march; when the speaker depicts the present, the reader simultaneously feels the past, the future, and the possibilities of what could have been. The speaker reflects on the choices of life and wonders what cards might I have drawn different? He asks his readers if they ever get to/thinking of everything one time. Memories collide; nostalgic relics of rural American life intermingle with the present day; dying department stores shut down and Amazon grows stronger; old Bibles sit side by side with smartphones playing YouTube videos. In this cycle of time, death looms over Dear Weirdo.

Hearses, funerals, and illnesses mix with the living.

Dear Weirdo does not shy from confronting societal issues that plague its American setting. Once the reader has eased into the poem’s world, lines such as numbers telling me/it’s early still and there is time still/for massacre and children/whose glass cheeks let you see/the laugh coming up/ahead of time growing up are all the

more cutting. Smith’s depiction of rural America displays poeticism without romanticizing its subjects. References to the opioid epidemic and growing rates of meth addiction abound. Economic inequality, collapsing industries, Covid-19, political turmoil— Smith presents America as he sees it and does so in a melodic, luminous way.

Dear Weirdo inspires the reader to find humor in tragedy and beauty in the mundane. Sandhill cranes and cedar waxwings dash through Smith’s pages leading to musings such as: yes it is possible to see the moon for the first time too nigh/them cranes’ll make you redream like that. Here, humanity is not separated from the natural world: it is interwoven with it, and there is a brightness in this combination. Even in its heavier themes, Smith’s poetry never loses this sense of joy: ah the waxwings today in between today/card the berries today/wool to way today/walk warmly today/and freely today.

Lydia O’Donnell is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Alabama and a former Fulbright South Korea fellow. Her home is in Bayfield County, northern Wisconsin, and she has also lived in Illinois and Ohio. She is working on a hybrid-genre collection of sci-fi fairy tales.

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Climate & Energy Spotlight

BRIDGING DIVIDES IN MARATHON COUNTY AND BEYOND

BY LIZZIE CONDON

W

isconsin’s status as a politically divided state often puts us in the national spotlight. One nonprofit organization working to bridge divides is the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service (WIPPS), which started in Wausau in 2007 at UW–Stevens Point with a mission to educate and engage residents of Wisconsin, develop future leaders, and help communities meet identified needs.

I had the opportunity to chat with two WIPPS team members— Francisco Guerrero, health coverage navigator and Hispanic services coordinator, and Nate Zurawski, project coordinator and research assistant—about the work the organization is doing to help advance Wisconsin’s communities.

Lizzie Condon: Rural communities in Marathon County have seen the closure of medical clinics and grocery stores in recent years, along with decreasing access to public transit. These issues exacerbate the impacts of climate change, especially on members of the Hispanic and Hmong communities. Francisco, could you describe the Hmong and Hispanic Communication Network project and its evolution?

Francisco Guerrero: The H2N project initially began as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It involved working with community health workers to address vaccination disparities in the Hmong and Hispanic communities. Over time, the project expanded beyond vaccinations to address broader social determinants of health, such as access to healthcare, interpretation services, and more.

LC: How is climate change impacting the communities you work with?

Nate Zurawski: Climate change is affecting agriculture in our region, particularly ginseng farms, which are integral to the local economy, especially for the local Hmong population. Changes in weather patterns and extreme conditions throughout the world are making it harder for farmers to maintain reliable crop production.

This impacts Wisconsin as well. For example, this season has been very dry, which means farmers have to increase the levels of irrigation on their farms, essentially impacting their bottom line. Luckily, here in Wisconsin we have access to many freshwater resources, most importantly the Great Lakes. Agricultural hubs like California aren’t as fortunate, and this may create opportunities for Wisconsin’s farmers if they can meet the challenges ahead.

FG: Additionally, climate change can affect the quality of water, working conditions, and access to healthcare in rural communities.

For example, extreme weather conditions can lead to heat-related illnesses among farmworkers, and limited access to healthcare and nutritious food can exacerbate health issues.

LC: Are rural communities and farmers actively engaged in climate change solutions?

NZ: We have seen some forward-thinking farmers who are adopting sustainable practices, such as diversifying crops, moving away from mono-culture farming, and using renewable energy sources like solar panels.

FG: It’s essential to provide information and programs that help farmers and rural communities understand and access climate change solutions. For instance, offering subsidies for solar panels to businesses to encourage sustainable practices is a good first step,

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but many farmers do not have the time to look into these programs and really understand their benefits. WIPPS has established two groups to help reach those communities: the Hmong and Hispanic Communication Network and the Rural Resiliency Network. Both do outreach to farmers and other people in rural communities to help them take advantage of programs and services that they might not have known were available.

LC: What are some other projects WIPPS is working on right now?

NZ: WIPPS’ mission is centered on community collaboration and service. Two bigger projects we’re currently focused on are Let’s Talk, Marathon County and Toward One Wisconsin. Let’s Talk, Marathon County aims to engage people from various backgrounds in constructive dialogues. The project will bring together around one hundred participants from diverse backgrounds in Marathon County to discuss community issues in a small, moderated group setting. The first issue we will be focusing on is youth mental health. T1W is a statewide conference that brings together leaders, professionals, and advocates to build and foster understanding around issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Last year we had over 120 presenters and more than 650 people attended the conference. The next conference will be held at the Pablo Center in Eau Claire, May 7 and 8, 2024.

Learn more about the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service by visiting WIPPS.org.

Francisco Guerrero

Nate Zurawski

Lizzie Condon is the director of science and climate programs at the Wisconsin Academy. She has a strong background in ornithological field studies and worked for the International Crane Foundation; she also has experience working in environmental policy and courtroom advocacy.

Grantchester

America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston

America’s Test Kitchen

Nature

Now you can stream more of your favorite PBS shows including Masterpiece, America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, America’s Test Kitchen, Nature, NOVA, Finding Your Roots, Ken Burns documentaries and many more — online and in the PBS App with PBS Wisconsin Passport.

Learn how to sign up or activate your membership at pbswisconsin.org/passport.

Nonprofit Org. U.S. POSTAGE

P A I D

MADISON, WI Permit No. 1564

1922 University Ave Madison, WI 53726

Academy Courses are designed to bring people together for lifelong learning and personal enrichment. Our expert instructors cultivate an intimate atmosphere for learning and discussion for creative people at all levels of experience.

TOTAL ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE DRAWING WORKSHOP

THE LOST ART OF WRITING NOTES & LETTERS

Instructor: Colin Matthes Thursdays November 2 – 30 (not Thanksgiving) 6:00–8:00 pm Virtual

Instructor: Marja Mills Saturdays December 2 – 16 1:00–3:00 pm Virtual

Drawing is a way of thinking. Like writing, drawing clarifies. It deepens our understanding.

Join artist Colin Matthes for a drawing workshop, where he’ll demonstrate drawing as a tool to visualize and share knowledge. This four session workshop is aimed at lifetime learners and offers a fun, low-pressure environment in which to use drawing to research, remember, communicate, figure things out, and to make your own instructional drawings!

In our world of dashed-off texts and emails, a thoughtful note or letter stands out. New York Times bestselling memoirist and avid letter writer Marja Mills will offer instruction and in-class writing prompts to help you to draft a note or letter you can be proud to send. The class covers writing to craft a concise holiday message; mark a graduation, retirement, or milestone birthday; offer a real apology; send thanks; reconnect with an old friend or associate; and more.

Join Us

Learn more and register at wisconsinacademy.org/courses