Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer 2014

wisc

people & ideas

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

Paul Vanderbilt:

Recombinant Iconographer The archivist who became a proselytizer for photography as an alternative language

Saving the World—One Robot at a Time Can FIRST Robotics help young women bridge the STEM gender gap?

Along the Yellowstone Trail $5.00 Vol. 60, No. 3

Summer 2014

Photographer Carl Corey takes us along a once-great route

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

Contents

summer 2014 FEATURES 4 FROM THE DIRECTOR Grounded in Place and Story

6 EDITOR’s NOTES The Kids Are Alright The Steenbock Center, offices of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 1558-9633) is published quarterly by the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters and is distributed free of charge to Wisconsin Academy members. For information about joining the Wisconsin Academy to receive this magazine, visit wisconsinacademy.org/join.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Copyright © 2014 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. All rights reserved. Postage is paid at Madison. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address below.

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Joseph Borgwardt, editorial assistant Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Paul Vanderbilt, in his office at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 1986.

Photograph by Lewis Koch

7 Upfront 7 Wisconsin Academy releases new report on energy and climate change 8 Penelope Project creates meaningful moments for those with memory loss 9 Edgerton literary festival boosts film component 10 Wisconsin begins search for new poet laureate 12 FEllow’s Forum Thoughts and observations on the one hundredth anniversary of the demise of the passenger pigeon by conservation biologist Stanley A. Temple

16 REPORT FIRST Robotics team mentor Erik Richardson introduces us to the girls and women bridging the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and math.

20 PHOTO JOURNAL In order to better understand the state of the State, photographer Carl Corey takes us on a walk Along the Yellowstone Trail.

28 ESSAY Once he’s heard a song, Leslie Lemke never forgets how to play it.

Darold A. Treffert shares the story of this man with an extraordinary talent.

32 Galleria What is iconography and how does it influence the way we understand photography today? Lewis Koch looks for clues in the life and works of archivist, photographer, and friend Paul Vanderbilt.

Jane Elder, executive director Randall Berndt, assistant curator, James Watrous Gallery Jody Clowes, exhibitions manager, James Watrous Gallery Meg Domroese, Initiatives program director Aaron Fai, project coordinator Martha Glowacki, director, James Watrous Gallery Elysse Lindell, outreach and data coordinator Don Meyer, business operations manager Amanda E. Shilling, director of development Jason A. Smith, director of communications and editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas administrative offices/steenbock gallery 1922 university ave. | madison, WI 53726 tel. 608-263-1692 www.wisconsinacademy.org

5424 - Fremont • “It’s tangible, it’s solid, it’s beautiful. It’s artistic, from my standpoint, and I just love real estate.” From the Along the Yellowstone Trail series, by Carl Corey. See page 20 for more photos.

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Contents

summer 2014 READ WISCONSIN 41 READ WISCONSIN

Meet the lead judges for our 2015 fiction and poetry contests:

Nickolas Butler and Kara Candito

42 FIctiON

The second place-prize story from our 2014 fiction contest,

“Snow Globe Policy,” by Jennifer Sauer

45 Book Reviews 45 Ron Seely reviews Banning DDT: How Citizen Activists in Wisconsin

Led the Way, by Bill Berry

47 Erika Janik reviews The Anatomy of Dreams, by Chloe Krug Benjamin 49 Robert H. Dott, Jr. reviews Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, by Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes

50 5Q Five questions for Menomonie-based graphic novel author and illustrator Erik A. Evensen

52 Poetry

Honorable mention poems from our 2014 poetry contest 56 LOCAL BOOKSHOP SPOTLIGHT

Brenda K. Bredahl pays a visit to the new and improved

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

Chapter2Books in Hudson

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters Officers of the Council President: Millard Susman President-elect: Linda Ware Immediate-past President: James W. Perry Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: James W. Perry Vice President of Sciences: Richard Burgess Vice President of Arts: Marianne Lubar Vice President of Letters: Linda Ware Statewide Councilors-at-Large Les Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Mark Bradley, Wausau Patricia Brady, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Art Harrington, Milwaukee Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jesse Ishikawa, Madison Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Tim Riley, La Crosse Tim Size, Sauk City Marty Wood, Eau Claire Officers of the Academy Foundation President: Jack Kussmaul Vice President: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Foundation Directors Marian Bolz Greg Dombrowski Jane Elder Terry Haller Douglas J. Hoerr Millard Susman

Smart and funny, Erik A. Evensen’s newest graphic novel follows the adventures of a paleoanthropologist named Brian Wegman who is called in to investigate a mysterious homicide in the lakeside college town of Wolfe’s Bay. Read more about Evensen and his creative reimagining of mythology on page 50.

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NEWS for

MEMBERS The fall of 2014 marks the 10th Anniversary of our James Watrous Gallery opening at the Overture Center for the Arts in downtown Madison. Today the Watrous Gallery is the premiere showcase for contemporary works by artists from across the state as well as for Wisconsin art and craft that explores the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters. Congratulations to the James Watrous Gallery for ten years of excellence!

Members in Southeastern Wisconsin are encouraged to attend our Academy Evening talk with Wisconsin Academy Fellow and conservation biologist Stanley A. Temple at the Greenfield Public Library (5310 W. Layton Ave.) on Tuesday, October 7, at 7:00 pm. Temple will share the story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and its consequences on science and society today. This event is free and open to the public. For more details, visit wisconsinacademy.org. We hope to see you there.

Friends and members of the Wisconsin Academy can expect our Fall 2014 Schedule of Events & Exhibitions to arrive in the mail this month. Over the last year we have been diligently working to upgrade our data systems, and have experienced a few glitches during the transition. If you have questions regarding your membership or the ways in which you receive communications from the Wisconsin Academy, please give us a call at 608-263-1692 or e-mail members@wisconsinacademy.org.

Update from the Council This summer, Wisconsin Academy Council president-elect Tom Pleger left his role as campus executive at UW– Baraboo/Sauk County to become the president of Lake Superior State University in Sault Saint Marie, MI. We enjoyed having Tom’s leadership and friendship during his service on the Council and wish him the best. With his departure, Linda Ware of Wausau has been elected to the office of Council president, and is slated to take the helm in January 2015.

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Carl Corey has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he is the recipient of more than 100 awards from the advertising, publishing, and photography communities. His photographs have been the subject of several books, including the Wisconsin Historical Society Press titles For Love and Money: A Portrait of the Family Business (2014) and The Tavern League: A Portrait of the Wisconsin Tavern (2011). He lives in Hudson with his wife Kay, dog/photography companion Cheddar, and puppy Blanca.

Corey’s work can be viewed at carlcorey.com.

Robert H. Dott, Jr. began his career at the University of WisconsinMadison in 1958 as an assistant professor in the Department of Geology. Today he is recognized as a humanitarian, champion of the geological sciences, and faithful student mentor. Dott’s pioneering research in sedimentary geology and well-attended lectures and field trips, along with many scholarly articles and a widely used and highly acclaimed textbook, Evolution of the Earth (8th ed., 2010), make him one of Wisconsin’s foremost historians of geologic thought. In addition to receiving the American Geological Institute’s Marcus Milling Legendary Geologist Medal and other awards, Dott became a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2011.

Erika Janik is a freelance writer and the executive producer/editor of Wisconsin Life at Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. She is the author many books, including A Short History of Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010), Apple: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2011), and Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine (Beacon Press, 2014). Janik’s work has appeared in Isthmus, The Onion, Midwest Living, the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine, the Wisconsin State Journal, and elsewhere.

Lewis Koch is an artist whose work has been shown in sites from garages to museums around the world. His photographs are in permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. As artist-in-residence at Copenhagen’s Fotografisk Center.

Koch created the web project (2001) and book (2009) Touchless Automatic Wonder, which provide a comprehensive overview of his work. He lives in Madison.

Erik Richardson is a science teacher at Aquinas Academy in Menomonee Falls, a graduate student in counseling, and a passionate mentor (albeit a non-technical one) for FIRST Robotics Team 1732–Hilltoppers.

Ron Seely joined the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism as a part-time reporter, editor, and student mentor after nearly 35 years at the Wisconsin State Journal. Seely is also a senior lecturer on the faculty of the Life Sciences Communication Department at UW–Madison, where he has taught science writing for 20 years. A three-time winner of the Wisconsin Press Association’s award for environmental reporting, Seely has won numerous awards for his newspaper work.

Darold A. Treffert received both his medical schooling and psychiatric residency training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He went on to develop the Children’s Unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute where, in 1962, he met his first savant. Dr. Treffert has been engaged in savant syndrome research since then. He was a consultant to the movie Rain Man, has written widely on savant syndrome, and has participated in numerous broadcast and documentary productions on the subject. A research consultant on autism at St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Dr. Treffert maintains an internationally active web site at savantsyndrome.com, hosted by the Wisconsin Medical Society. He is the author of Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010).

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F R O M T H E D I R E C TO R

Grounded in Place and Story JANE ELDER WISCONSIN ACADEMY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

At the beginning of a recent retreat for our staff and board of directors, I asked everyone to describe their favorite place in Wisconsin. Responses were largely what you would expect: a beloved family farm that went back for generations, a treasured backyard garden, fields and woods steeped in childhood memories, and, of course, the familiar family lake cabin “Up North.”

My choice was Julian Bay on Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. A few others mentioned enchanted natural areas like the great confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers at Wyalusing or the perfect place for bay side sunset viewing in Door County. There were even two votes for that magical combination of forest and stage that is American Players Theatre in Spring Green.

The conversation was a great way for our directors and staff to better get to know each other, and it set a collegial tone for the retreat discussions that followed. But—and I only realized this a bit later—the conversation also affirmed for the group just how much the natural places we know and love define what Wisconsin means to us all.

Whatever our connection to Wisconsin might be, for most of us that connection was formed through a relationship with the landscape. It means that we care, either directly or abstractly, about the wellbeing of that landscape. In doing so, we become part of the memory of that landscape—and part of its future.

The Wisconsin Academy is all about connecting people and ideas. And part of what shapes our ideas—indeed, what makes us human—is grounded in place. The celebrated writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry once said that, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” I think that his observation could easily have come from seeing the relationship we have with our lands, waters, cities, towns, and everything in between here in Wisconsin. We’re not just an amalgamation of addresses and zip codes. The places of Wisconsin that we hold dear help inspire and motivate us to sustain them, safeguard them, and make them better for those who follow.

Earlier this year one of our Waters of Wisconsin Initiative working groups was challenged to visualize a place or experience that meant “water” in Wisconsin. The words and stories that emerged from this group of researchers and conservationists were rich with memory and meaning. There were comments about the sense of space that water provides, the flat expanses of lake ice, seemingly endless horizons, and sunlight dancing across a lake. Others talked about water being a place where we gather and connect: on beaches with friends and families, with an uncle in the fishing boat, in a canoe with a paddling buddy, in a trout stream with other anglers; or with herons, frogs, fish,

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and other inhabitants. The groups noted that water was also a place for escape, contemplation, solace, and renewal. One person described water as a place to be “away” but still connected. We are, after all, constructed mostly of water.

While our prompt was for visual images about water, other sensory experiences wove their way into our observations. The “zing and plop” of a well-cast fishing line and lure hitting the surface evoked countless summer memories for me. Someone else noted the background buzz of powerboats on lakes. We articulated various voices of water, from the slap of waves on a boat at the dock, to the babble of brooks and springs, to the way sound carries over water, to the silence at dusk and the hum of summer insects in the moist air. We talked about the smell of wet sand (and wet dogs), fresh snow, thawing soil in the spring, and the delight of rolling in sand as a kid (followed by the co-mingled smell and grit of silica and Coppertone). Water also holds mystery and another world under its surface: spawning beds, shafts of light penetrating to lake and riverbeds or into dark unknown depths, the experience of swimming underwater and being submerged and suspended at the same time.

I invite you to try this exercise with a group of friends or colleagues. I expect you’ll discover a tapestry of images that speaks to you in profound ways, too.

While water is one defining aspect of Wisconsin, our state is distinct from any other part of the world in many other ways.

Teasing out the attributes and experiences that make Wisconsin unique is part of what helps us understand why we value it so much. This process also reminds us that we need to safeguard places and experiences that are the essence of Wisconsin— elements which might seem commonplace, but are increasingly rare in a rapidly changing world.

From its origins in 1870, the Academy has sought to explore, understand and share the lessons Wisconsin has to teach us through scientific investigation, artistic expression, and the observations of great writers. It all started with a fascination for the place we know as Wisconsin, which is still today—yes—a wellspring of imagination.

This summer, I hope you can connect with a place or experience that is quintessentially “Wisconsin” and consider how it has enriched your life, your language, and your view of the world.

Drop us a line if you want to talk. We’ll be listening.

Send questions and comments to jelder@wisconsinacademy.org

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the issues of our times

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through civil discussion?

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EDItor’s Notes

The Kids Are Alright Jason A. Smith Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Last February at the Governor’s Conference on Economic Development, UW–Madison School of Business economist Morris Davis raised the alarm about our “massive brain drain” problem in Wisconsin. In his presentation at the conference, and in subsequent media appearances since then, Davis described how from 2008 to 2012 Wisconsin lost 60,000 college graduates, most of whom were between the ages of 21 to 29. While some of these people moved to nearby urban areas like Chicago or Minneapolis, many moved out of the Midwest entirely.

“You might say, Well, they’ll come back. [But] they don’t come back,” said Davis, adding, “I don’t think that’s good for the state.”

The problem of brain drain—a relatively nonspecific term used to describe the flight of educated people from a distinct geographic area—isn’t new to our state (or any others in the Midwest for that matter). According to Jeff Sachse, a labor economist with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, we’ve been trying to address the problem since the 1990s through various economic incentives and student retention initiatives.

But what’s different today says Sachse is that the carrot of a stable, long-term career in Wisconsin is no longer adequate enticement. “Quality of life issues are increasingly important for young professionals and new college graduates,” he says, and, as such, these issues need to be incorporated in any strategy to address brain drain.

Step One to any good strategy is getting to know the players, and the brains draining from our state happen to belong to the Millennial Generation, those young professionals and new college graduates born between roughly 1980 and 2000. At 80 million strong—roughly 27% of the US population—Millennials are not only the largest age cohort, they are also the highest educated and most racially diverse in American history, according to the US Census Bureau.

Born into the era of the Internet and Big Data, the Millennials are also the most-studied generation in American history.

Indeed, study after study—probably the most important of which is the Pew Research Center’s Millennials: Portrait of Generation Next—reflect the central themes at work in the Millennial character: digitally connected, confident, self-expressive, socially liberal, upbeat, and open to change. And, while no group of 80 million people can be considered homogenous, studies suggest that these character traits drive Millennial desires for their lives, careers, and families.

Much has been written and said about the Millennials—some of it flattering, much of it disparaging. But I would remind readers that rarely has an older generation sought to point out the best qualities of a younger one (think of what your forebears said of your generation and you will know what I mean).

While I’m not an expert in understanding the “Millennial mindset,” I do think it is important that I and others my age 6

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and older make an effort to try to get to know the Millennials if we truly want to court and retain the best and brightest in our beloved state.

I bring this up because there was also something else that Davis said at the conference that caught my attention. He noted that, even though the state’s population is rising about 0.5 percent a year, most of the growth is in people age 65 or older.

It’s true: Wisconsin, like my hair, is rapidly graying. While older people are indeed migrating into the state, the elderly population is becoming proportionately larger as more and more young people leave.

The Wisconsin Applied Population Lab at University of Wisconsin–Madison reports that by 2020, 24% of the state will be age 60 and older; by 2030, more than 27% will be 60-plus (Yikes, you might think, that’s me!). Projections from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services also reflect this trend, with a so-called “aging boom” concentrating the population of retirees in many northern and north-central counties as younger people depart, thereby placing further pressure on communities already suffering from a lack of smart, young doctors, teachers, public servants, and other civic and business leaders.

It appears that we are heading for a perfect storm, a typhoon of “brain drain” punctuated by an “aging boom” with massive implications for both high- and low-tech industry, municipal and public services, even state and local tax bases.

Millennials, then, might just be the proverbial life raft that can help us weather this storm.

Let’s return to what Sasche said about “quality of life issues.”

While a largely objective concept, I think most of us can agree that quality of life revolves around larger, more interconnected things, the things that, well, make life worth living: good schools and safe neighborhoods, opportunities for lifelong education and meaningful encounters with the arts and culture, a healthy natural environment and a fair and equitable community in which to pursue one’s dreams and goals. The character traits of Millennials point to the pursuit of this higher quality of life. And they are willing to move somewhere to find it.

So, talk to a Millennial. Try to understand what makes them tick. Better yet, ask them to stay in Wisconsin. Retention policies and economic incentives aren’t going to cut it. We—Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials—will have to work together to cultivate an environment that will attract and keep smart young people in our state. And, perhaps in doing so, we’ll find new ways to invigorate the cultural, environmental, and industrial economy of tomorrow.

Send questions and comments to jsmith@wisconsinacademy.org

UPFRONT

Wisconsin Academy Issues New Report on Options for Advancing Clean Energy and Reducing Emissions that Contribute to Climate Change On June 1, 2014, the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters released a report, Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future, that identifies five “Pathways to Progress” to reduce Wisconsin’s dependence on fossil fuels and support sustainable energy sources: • increasing energy conservation and efficiency to help consumers save money and lessen the need for new power plants and transmission; • expanding development and use of renewable energy to create local clean energy resources; • enhancing transportation systems to provide more efficient and cost-effective options for people and products; • managing forests, grasslands, and other living landscapes to better support natural processes that store carbon in plants and soils; • encouraging business models that incorporate “whole business” strategies which embrace sustainability practices, learning, and innovation.

“While addressing climate change and developing clean energy are global challenges, our new report outlines many practical steps that we can take right now to improve Wisconsin’s quality of life and protect it for future generations,” says Wisconsin Academy director Jane Elder.

The Climate Forward report also profiles seventeen Wisconsin businesses, communities, and individuals in the vanguard of energy innovation and other sustainability practices.

Tom Eggert, founder and executive director of the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council and Climate Forward contributor notes that, “Wisconsin-grown leadership in energy efficiency, renewables, and conservation is already making a difference, and we want to share their stories to show that these are practical options that are good for business now and in the future.”

The report outlines dozens of options for action at many scales, from establishing goals for incremental progress in improving energy efficiency across the state each year to expanding renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and bioenergy to levels comparable to neighboring states.

“Our state can leverage its legacy as an innovator and a leader on conservation or we can lag behind as other states reap the benefits associated with developing new industries and embracing emerging opportunities. The authors of this report presume Wisconsin will want to lead,” says report contributor Kathy Kuntz of Cool Choices, a workplace-based program that offers fun and social incentives for adopting a sustainable lifestyle.

Echoing Kuntz’s assessment, Elder says that by leveraging Wisconsin’s existing and emerging capacities we can make advances across a number of actions within the Pathways to Progress.

Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future

A Wisconsin Initiative Report of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

“In keeping with recommendations from the international scientific community, this report recommends reducing Wisconsin’s fossil fuel emissions by 80% by the year 2050,” says Elder, noting that the report outlines steps to move toward this goal through a list of options and opportunities that includes dozens of specific actions within the five Pathways to Progress that could reduce Wisconsin’s carbon footprint and/or diversify and grow its clean energy portfolio.

Elder says that “Wisconsin can and should play a positive, solution-oriented role as our world faces climatic changes that threaten our health, safety, and the stability of natural systems that sustain Wisconsin as we know and love it. Change creates opportunity, but that opportunity comes with the responsibility to pursue options that will benefit and sustain the people of Wisconsin, our environment, and our economy in a global context.”

The Climate Forward report is the culmination of input from public forums in Milwaukee, Madison, and Ashland in 2013, as well as guidance and contributions from a project steering committee and advisors with expertise related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainability, education, and climate research.

Two versions of the report, the full report and an abbreviated executive summary, can be downloaded from the Wisconsin Academy’s website at wisconsinacademy.org/climateforward.

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Photo credit: 371 Productions

UPFRONT

The Penelope Project Creates Meaningful Moments for Seniors with Memory Loss In the Fall of 2010 an unlikely group of actors set to work transforming Luther Manor Senior Living Community in Wauwatosa into an interactive venue for live theatre. Familiar facility settings—resident rooms, the dining hall, the sanctuary— became part of a living stage upon which a cast of University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee students, professional actors from Portland-based Sojourn Theatre, and Luther Manor residents joined together to re-imagine Homer’s Odyssey. Focusing on Odysseus’s wife and her refutation of 108 suitors during her husband’s absence, their original play, called Finding Penelope, debuted on March 15th, 2011.

For playwright Anne Basting, Finding Penelope represented a community-based effort to create “activities in long-term care [that are] more meaningful.” An author, director of the UWM Center on Age & Community, and founder of Timeslips Creative Storytelling, Bastings has devoted her career to helping those living with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. She has found that by fostering a safe environment for storytelling and theatrical improvisation one can “replace the pressure to remember with the freedom to imagine.” Her Penelope Project seeks to create meaningful moments and connections through “openended creative storytelling,” which provides the backbone for the project’s engaging, and often challenging, activities that incorporate poetry, movement, and visual art.

Basting chose Homer’s Odyssey as the foundation for her play because she wanted resident actors to feel as if they were a part of something bigger and older, something that transcended generations. Penelope was chosen as the heroine because her plight—waiting for her husband’s return while fending off unwanted visitors—is emblematic of the daily

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struggle of long-term care patients, especially those with memory loss: waiting for familiar faces while being confronted by strangers. As Basting puts it, the play “recasts waiting as a position of strength.”

The performances of Finding Penelope sold out, brought many audience members to tears, and drew rave reviews from its professional and resident actors alike. And, in many ways, the living stage they created became a living community. New relationships were forged between UWM theatre students and Luther Manor residents and staff, setting a positive example for intergenerational exchange that is hard to come by in a youth-driven culture that marginalizes seniors.

Basting explains that due to the shuffling nature of staff and residents in long-term care homes, this forging of trust is essential for facilities to take open-minded approaches to new activities like the Penelope Project. “Much of this work is about inviting people to be open to creativity in an environment that too often stultifies it.”

Basting is currently at work furthering this idea of creating a more connected community through a new project called Islands of Milwaukee, which addresses the social isolation that grips many homebound seniors and other community members. “When we finished Penelope, we really felt like we had succeeded in building community. But then we thought: Most older adults don’t live in care homes. 85% live in their own homes, and more than ever before, they are living alone.”

Islands of Milwaukee will culminate as interactive performances on September 20th and 21st at Milwaukee City Hall, with an attendant exhibit running through October.

UPFRONT

Photo credit: UWM/Peck School of the Arts

Edgerton Book & Film Festival Expands Opportunities for Learning

Left: A 371 Productions still image captures the climactic chorus scene of Finding Penelope. A trailer for the 371 Productions documentary and screening dates and locations can be found at 371productions.com.

Above: Anne Bastings, playwright of Finding Penelope.

The Penelope Project and other endeavors like it set an example that other care homes can follow. Given the sitespecific nature of Finding Penelope, program directors decided that their play would be “impossible to replicate exactly” but instead hope to share their approach and framework. Basting notes that several projects inspired

by Finding Penelope have since been staged, including a musical in a Madison care community. A spectrum of educational tools and training options available on both the Penelope Project and Timeslips websites allow for other care homes to use these materials as guidepost for their own adaptations.

Aiding in the effort to share these materials is 371 Productions’ Penelope: The Documentary, which follows the entire arc of Finding Penelope from its planning stages to its Luther Manor performances. The documentary supplements the other Penelope Project materials, conveying the emotional weight and joy experienced by resident-actors. By capturing the immediate, momentary connections and sharing them with a much larger audience, the documentary celebrates the achievement of the original performances and shares them with others—which is very much in the spirit of the Penelope Project as a whole.

Penelope: The Documentary was featured on Wisconsin Public Television’s Director’s Cut program this past June, and can be seen airing at film festivals and screenings both in Wisconsin and nationwide.

For more information on the Penelope Project and other related projects, visit thepenelopeproject.com.

—Joseph Borgwardt

Founded in 2005 to celebrate the legacy of Rascal author and hometown hero Sterling North (1906–1973), the Edgerton Sterling North Book & Film Festival has expanded in recent years to include talks and readings with local and national authors as well as “how to” sessions for aspiring authors seeking to publish new works.

Festival organizers and co-chairs Diane Everson and Michelle Hamm stress the importance of offering festival programming that encourages community engagement in the arts and cultivates life-long learning. To this end they have incorporated a new learning element to the film side of the festival this year.

“We have shown films in the past, but this year we wanted to have well-known authors and film industry persons tell our audiences ‘how to’ take a book to TV, write a screenplay, write and produce a film, and do special effects,” says Hamm.

A build-up event in July premiered a stage adaptation of Paul Fleishman’s award-winning book, Seedfolks, which has recently been a Community Read title for Sun Prairie as well as for other cities across the U.S. This year’s Edgerton Sterling North Book & Film Festival in September will feature Elizabeth Ridley, Wisconsin author and screenwriter of her first feature film, Handle With Care; Deborah Blum, well-known author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, and the subsequent PBS program of the same name that premiered last year; Sun Prairie resident and special effects creator, Alex Falk; and Bobby Schmidt and Mark Winter, two writers, producers, directors, and independent filmmakers from the Milwaukee area.

“These people were asked to participate because they each bring a different talent to the film side, and we are delighted that they [will] share their time and talents with our audiences,” says Everson.

The film component is a welcomed addition to a festival whose overall goal is to cultivate a stronger and broader community of writers, readers, and artists of all ages, and organizers hope the expanded festival will grow the reputation of Edgerton as a hub for film as well as for literature.

Other featured presenters for 2014 include nationally renowned children’s author, David Wiesner, winner of the 2014 Sterling North Literary Legacy Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature; Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland, in-demand youth authors Ben Mikaelsen (Touching Spirit Bear) and Terry Wooten (Stone Circle Poetry); Madison’s Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery Series couple, Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden, and others.

The Edgerton Sterling North Book & Film Festival takes place on September 27, 2014. Admission is free. For more information, visit sterlingnorthbookfestival.com.

—Merri Oxley

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UPFRONT

Looking for the Next Wisconsin Poet Laureate The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, in partnership with the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, recently announced an open call for applications for the 2015–2016 Wisconsin Poet Laureate.

Beginning August 18, 2014, the call for applications is open to individual poets who are seeking to fill the two-year Wisconsin Poet Laureate position as well as to people who wish to nominate a poet for the position.

The state’s leading poetic voice, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate is also an ambassador for poetry, encouraging the reading and writing of poetry across Wisconsin. The Poet Laureate engages a variety of constituencies, enriching the lives of residents by sharing and promoting poetry through conversation, readings, public appearances, workshops, and digital and social media.

“It’s an exciting position,” says Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission chair William Stobb. “Our recent Laureates have really connected with Wisconsinites all over the state, and during this upcoming term, thanks to a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board, we’re pleased to be able to provide some additional financial support for statewide poetry programming. So, this is a great opportunity for a poet to have a big impact on the state’s arts culture.”

An all-volunteer board, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission was created by Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson through Executive Order 404 on July 31, 2000, and continued by Governor Jim Doyle. The Commission conducts the Wisconsin

Poet Laureate selection process, assigns responsibilities to the selected Poet Laureate, and assists that individual in performing official duties. In May, 2011, the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters announced their stewardship of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission to ensure the survival of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate after Governor Scott Walker eliminated state support for the position.

Members of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission include representatives from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, the Wisconsin Center for the Book, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, as well as several at-large members.

The Poet Laureate’s term of service is two years. The current Wisconsin Poet Laureate is Max Garland, who lives in Eau Claire.

The next term begins in January of 2015 and ends on December 31, 2016. The new Wisconsin Poet Laureate for the 2015–2016 term will be announced on January 5, 2015. The Wisconsin Poet Laureate is awarded a $2,000 per-year stipend, managed by the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, which honors the poet’s achievements and helps to defray travel expenses.

Interested parties should electronically submit complete application materials to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission at wipoetlaureate@gmail.com no later than October 10, 2014.

For application instructions and additional information, visit wisconsinacademy.org/newpl.

—Jason A. Smith

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission adds three new members The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission recently welcomed three new members to help conduct the Wisconsin Poet Laureate selection process, assign responsibilities to the elected poet laureate, and assist that individual in performing official duties: Sheri Castelnuovo, Ching-in Chen, and Mark Zimmermann.

Sheri Castelnuovo has been responsible for the planning and execution of public programming at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art since 1991. She oversees all of the museum’s educational programming, including the docent program, school programs and learning resources, adult enrichment programs, online exhibitions, and film and video series. She serves as co-curator of the Wisconsin Triennial Exhibition and collaborates with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets to present interdisciplinary poetry events at MMoCA.

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Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart’s Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kundiman, Lambda, Norman Mailer Poetry and Callaloo Fellow and member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. In Milwaukee, they are Cream City Review’s editor-in-chief and senior editor at The Conversant.

Mark Zimmermann represents the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets on the Commission. Since 2004, Mark has lived in Milwaukee where he teaches humanities and writing courses at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. From 1993–2001, he taught American literature at Ibaraki University in Mito, Japan, while also working as a journalist and editor. He has also taught at colleges in Russia, the Netherlands, and Poland.

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A Bird We Have Lost and a Doubt We Have Gained

By Stanley A. Temple Wisconsin Academy Fellow since 2014

Stanley A. Temple is the BeersBascom Professor Emeritus in

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Conservation in the Department

n the mid-19th century, the passenger pigeon was the most

of Forest and Wildlife Ecology

abundant bird in North America, numbering three to five billion,

and former Chairman of the

according to scientist and naturalist A. W. Schorger.

Conservation Biology and Sustain-

A former Wisconsin Academy President, Schorger wrote in 1955 what is still considered to be the definitive account of the life and death of the species: The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction. In his book, Schorger described the passenger pigeon as “the most impressive species of bird that man has ever known.”

It’s hard to imagine today that the bird was once so abundant that flocks darkened the skies for days as they passed continuously overhead or that one bird in every four in North America was a passenger pigeon. It is also hard to comprehend that in just half a century of unregulated overexploitation we killed them off entirely. The last wild bird was shot in 1902, and in 1914 the last surviving bird, a female named Martha, died in her cage at a Cincinnati zoo.

Today, a century after the bird’s extinction, the tragic story of the passenger pigeon needs to be retold—not only because most people have forgotten it, but also because it provides important lessons for the present and the future as we confront an unprecedented mass extinction of species as a result of our actions.

To take advantage of this “teachable moment,” I have joined with other conservationists in creating Project Passenger

able Development Program in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

For 32 years he held the academic position once occupied by Aldo Leopold. Temple is currently a Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation and was elected a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2014. Temple has received many awards for his work in wildlife ecology and conservation, and his students have helped save many of the world’s endangered species and the habitats on which they depend.

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Pigeon (passengerpigeon.org). We are dedicating 2014 to the commemoration of the centennial of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Already I have devoted much of this year to helping lead the effort to tell the story of the passenger pigeon, and to cramming as much public outreach as I can into the centennial year.

My outreach efforts will culminate this fall in a weekend of commemorative activities in Madison (see page 14), co-hosted by the Wisconsin Academy. The weekend will feature a diversity of pigeon-related events: lectures, a screening of a new documentary film, a staged reading of a play, a performance of a pigeon-inspired symphony, and much more.

My various outreach efforts over the last few months have already given me a chance to interact with thousands of individuals from the conservation community and the general public. Several observations, some encouraging and others troubling, have emerged from these interactions.

I’ve discovered that most of the general public and even some dedicated conservationists don’t really know the story of the passenger pigeon and how it changed America’s relationship with wildlife. In 1947, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology did something unprecedented at the time: it erected the first-ever

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ABOVE: Stanley A. Temple addresses the audience at the May 17, 2014, rededication of the Passenger Pigeon Monument at Wyalusing State Park. Temple, who led the effort to restore the 67-year old monument, has traveled the U.S. this year on a speaking tour in observance of the centenary of the extinction of the species.

public monument to a species that had become extinct because of human activities. For the dedication of the Passenger Pigeon Monument at Wyalusing State Park in western Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold wrote an essay, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” in which he predicted this eventuality: “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live that, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind.

But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”

Now, as we observe the centennial of the passenger pigeon’s extinction, Leopold’s prediction has seemingly come true.

It’s hard for people today to empathize with the national mindset of the 19th century, a time when the wildlife resources of the continent must have seemed inexhaustible. It was also a time when the exploitation of wildlife resources was almost completely unregulated. I have been dismayed by how many Americans don’t understand what we did to the passenger pigeon and almost did to other species such as the wild turkey and American bison that were hunted commercially to near extinction.

Each year, wherever they attempted to nest, passenger pigeons were slaughtered by the millions for their meat by thousands of professional market hunters and locals who converged on the nesting colonies. The disturbances caused by the nonstop killing made the birds abandon their nesting attempts. Killed on an industrial scale and prevented from repro-

ducing, the pigeon’s extinction became a mathematical certainty. It’s now almost inconceivable how such a decimation of wildlife was tolerated for so long before anything meaningful was done to curtail it.

People today also don’t appreciate how the passenger pigeon’s shocking extinction catalyzed the 20th century conservation movement. Republican congressman John F. Lacey referred specifically to the pigeon when he introduced the first federal wildlife protection legislation, the Lacey Act, in 1900: The wild pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind. Let us now give an example of wise conservation of what remains of the gifts of nature.

Other legislative and regulatory actions of the early 20th century were similarly motivated by the pigeon’s shocking demise and made specific reference to the bird. Although these actions came too late to save the passenger pigeon, other species that were nearing extinction benefited and recovered once protection and management were in place.

Questions from audiences I talk to frequently deal with “What if?” scenarios: If we had acted in time to save the passenger pigeon, could we have then coexisted with it in the modern world? Or would we have switched from killing them for W isc o nsin

commodity to killing them for the damage they could do to crops or other reasons of general nuisance?

Certainly there were horror stories from 19th century wheat farmers in the Midwest who saw their crops disappear in an instant when huge flocks of hungry passenger pigeons descended on their fields. Aldo Leopold held this same concern, when he wrote that “if the pigeoners had not done away with him [the passenger pigeon], the farmers would ultimately have been obliged, in self defense, to do so.”

The possibility of “de-extinction” and the fascination of many of its proponents with using emerging biotechnologies to resurrect the passenger pigeon from remnant DNA in museum specimens evokes mixed reactions in all my audiences. Some are initially captivated by how utterly “cool” it would be to give the species a second chance, but upon further reflection most worry about unintended consequences and the ethics of genetically engineering life in the name of conservation. Others worry that if extinction is no longer a permanent state, the conservation movement is likely to lose more than it gains. Species might be tacitly allowed to become extinct because we can always preserve some DNA and bring them back in the future.

With so much current attention focused on the impacts of habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change, it is easy to forget that direct overkill (i.e., humans killing animals faster than they can reproP E O P L E

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duce and replace the losses), while no longer a major threat to wildlife in North America, is a major threat to many species across the globe. We need only remind ourselves of things happening at this very moment—overfishing and the collapse of commercially valuable marine life, poaching and illegal trade in high-value products from species such as elephants and rhinos, or the persecution of species that prey on domestic livestock—before questions arise about what can and should be done to protect these and other species.

This is when the lesson of the passenger pigeon becomes most relevant.

We addressed overkill in North America by instituting legal protection for wildlife, by learning how to exploit wildlife resources sustainably (but not commercially) and by ensuring that resources for both protecting and managing wildlife are adequate to prevent deliberate overkill.

We changed a culture in just a generation. We proved it was possible to relegate overkill to the dustbin of history.

One hopes that a hundred years from now we will look back at the 21st century as the period in which direct overkill by

CONNECT:

human activities is finally eliminated as a threat to wildlife throughout the world.

This means that some types of overkill simply need to be banned, and all forms of wildlife exploitation need to be done sustainably. Existing legal protections need to be more vigorously enforced. And endangered species need more protection and management, not less. Perhaps reflecting on the passenger pigeon in 2014 will help these things happen.

Wisconsin has played a recurring and significant role in the passenger pigeon story. The state was a principal nesting area for the bird and, in 1871, hosted the largest nesting colony ever recorded. It covered over 850 square miles of central Wisconsin with pigeons nesting in almost every tree. It was the scene of a welldocumented, massive slaughter of the birds. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, was almost certainly born in Wisconsin in 1887.

The Passenger Pigeon Monument at Wyalusing State Park stands as a permanent reminder of what we have lost. Aldo Leopold’s “On a Monument to the Pigeon” is considered by many to be one of the most poignant essays ever written about

human-caused extinctions. He subsequently included it among the essays in his classic book, A Sand County Almanac, which has been read by millions.

Leopold’s 1947 admonitions about the death of the passenger pigeon are as appropriate today as they were 67 years ago: We who erect this monument are performing a dangerous act.

Because our sorrow is genuine, we are tempted to believe that we had no part in the demise of the pigeon.

The truth is that our grandfathers, who did the actual killing, were our agents. They were our agents in the sense that they shared the conviction, which we have only now begun to doubt, that it is more important to multiply people and comforts than to cherish the beauty of the land in which they live. What we are doing here today is publicly to confess a doubt whether this is true.

This, then, is a monument to a bird we have lost, and to a doubt we have gained. Z

Passenger Pigeon Events

Passenger Pigeon Symposium: From Billions to None

Passenger Pigeon Events

Join the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters for a series of programs commemorating the centenary of the demise of the passenger pigeon. Presented in partnership with the UW–Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.

Saturday, November 1, 1–5:00 pm in UW–Madison Union South* Producer David Mrazek screens his documentary film Billions to None: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction and joins Stan Temple, Curt Meine, David Blockstein, and Joel Greenberg for a symposium.

Saturday, November 1, 7–9:00 pm in Morphy Hall, UW–Madison Mosse Humanities Building The Bricks Theater stages a reading of a new play, “The Savage Passengers,” followed by a Q&A with playwright Bret Angelos and cast members.

Sunday, November 2, 2–4:00 pm in Mills Concert Hall, UW–Madison Mosse Humanities Building The UW Symphony Orchestra performs the ”The Columbiad,” composed by Anthony Philip Heinrich and inspired by vast flocks of passenger pigeons.

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MADISON PUBLIC LIBRARY’S

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Michael Perry The Scavengers Sun, Oct 19th at 11:00AM

Atul Gawande Being Mortal Fri, Oct 24th at 7:00 PM

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Saving the World — One Robot at a Time FIRST Robotics Creates STEM Leadership Opportunities for Girls b y E ri k R ic h ardson

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magine what we might see if only we could build a warp field—a bend in the fabric of spacetime—that would allow us to peer into the future. Might we see what we will have accomplished, and thereby bring back the knowledge gained from those accomplishments?

What would you say if I told you that even as you read this article students are creating a kind of warp field that offers them a glimpse of their future selves and accomplishments?

This is the nature of a FIRST Robotics regional tournament, like the one held at the Cellular Arena in downtown Milwaukee each spring and in cities around the country—and, in some cases, around the world. Founded in 1989, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is a nonprofit, international youth organization that operates the FIRST Robotics Competition as well as FIRST LEGO League, Junior FIRST LEGO League, and FIRST Tech Challenge competitions.

The mission of FIRST is to show students of every age that science, technology, and problem-solving are not only fun and rewarding, but are proven paths to successful careers and a bright future for us all.

All photos provided by the author unless otherwise noted.

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Indulge me for a moment and try to visualize the groups of high school students swarm lazily around in the pit area at the back half of the sports arena floor during the morning hours of the recent FIRST Robotics regional tournament in Milwaukee.

Their varied elliptical orbits take them to and from their portable work booths to run tests and maintenance on their robots. And these are large, complex robots—the real thing, all rivets and welds, pneumatics and electronics with gears and belts and appendages of all different sizes and shapes.

Look closer at the frenzied pace of midday competition in full swing and try to keep up as whole groups of students pull their team robots into the orbit that now includes the rollicking competition floor in the front half of the arena. A team brings their robot to the game field and a cheer erupts from the stands. Soon, another team and another uproarious cheer.

report

Controlled by their respective teams, the robots compete in head-to-head games on the floor (and on the JumboTron screen). In this year’s game, robots of different sizes and shapes pass giant exercise balls to each other and over barriers while other robots try to prevent them from doing so and pass their own balls down field to score, all while the crowd sings along to campy classics like Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”—bum, bum, bah—and “YMCA” by the Village People, pantomiming the now-famous dance moves. Sprinkled through the crowd are groups of bouncing students in various levels of costuming to show their support for the STEMpunks, the Robo Chickens, or any of the other sixty or so teams. During breaks in the competition, long lines of team mascots do the Macarena.

The competition, randomly assigned three-on-three matches to see which teams will go home with the trophy as the Wisconsin Regional Champions, goes on for two-plus days (almost three if you include practice on Thursday). After awards are given out late Saturday afternoon, and wins and losses are absorbed, the thrum and vibration begin to dissipate. Students and mentors begin to break down their work booths and load up for trips back home (home for some being across town and for others across the country).

This is just a glimpse of what goes on at a FIRST Robotics competition. Powered by the work of 130,000 volunteers and 3,500 sponsors, FIRST Robotics hosts competitions like this across the globe, from Hawaii to Israel and from Mexico City to the Netherlands, fielding teams from kindergarten on up, including 2,720 high school teams.

It’s worth noting that there are a number of young women who participate—and have participated—in FIRST Robotics,

many of whom go on to become leaders in fields like science and robotics. For these young women, FIRST Robotics is encouraging more and deeper participation in what are commonly known as STEM areas—science, technology, engineering, and math.

And this is a good thing, given the prevailing gender gap in these areas.

For instance, a 2011 US Department of Commerce report, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation, revealed that women represent a mere 24% of the current STEM workforce.

According to the report, men are much more likely than women to have a STEM job regardless of educational attainment: one out of four math and computer jobs is held by a woman, while one out of seven engineers is a woman. Recent news headlines—“STEM Fields and the Gender Gap: Where are the Women?” (Forbes, June 2012), and “Why Are there Still So Few Women in Science?” (New York Times, October 2013)—underscore the trend of low participation by women in STEM fields.

What are the reasons behind this low participation? More importantly, how can we help girls to succeed—and lead— in STEM-related fields? Peer again into the warp field and I will show you how FIRST Robotics volunteers, mentors, and students are all creating a brighter future for women in STEM.

The Rocket Scientist and the Fangirl Amber Gell is a hometown girl from Franklin, Wisconsin, with a successful career as a NASA rocket scientist. Gell has flown home each spring for the last six years to serve as a judge for Wisconsin’s FIRST Regional Tournament, and she seemed delighted for any excuse to talk about FIRST Robotics.

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Aerospace engineer and scientist Amber Gell has served as judge for both regional and national FIRST Robotics competitions.

Photo credit: nasa.gov

While Franklin High School didn’t have a robotics team when she was there, Gell says she really wishes they had because she would have been better positioned for success earlier in her career. Today Gell works for Lockheed Martin as a spacecraft systems engineer for Orion’s Landing and Recovery Systems team, but she has had to find her own way. The kind of experiences FIRST provides could have propelled her along much more rapidly.

According to Gell, one of the ways the FIRST program prepares students for real-world engineering is by helping them “learn to be adaptable, and to have a good attitude” “I work on spacecraft, and stuff breaks all the time,” she says.

“These young men and women have a chance to get used to that, and to see the fun and the challenge in [dealing with] that.”

Gell points out just how important it is for students to learn how to compete against and also collaborate with other groups. Again, she notes that in many ways this is how it is done in the real world where, for instance, Boeing may be bidding against McDonnell-Douglas on one project and on the next they may be teaming up.

Another key element Gell mentions is how FIRST Robotics fills these kids with passion and confidence. She says that it doesn’t matter whether the students are talking to a student from another team or a CEO from a Fortune 500 company (or a NASA rocket scientist), they light up when they start describing what they’ve done and accomplished, how they solved this engineering problem or cleared that programming hurdle.

In fact, a five-minute conversation with any of the FIRST Robotics adult volunteers almost always leads to a story or anecdote about a moment when some young person’s future changed direction because of their involvement in the program.

For Gell, that young person was a high school senior named Rachel from FIRST Team 1714–More Robotics. Gell describes how Rachel went all fangirl—the somewhat crazed way we picture someone behaving at a boy-band concert—during the

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Milwaukee tournament, getting Gell’s signature and manically chatting her up. Gell was somewhat surprised when Rachel followed up their conversation with remarkable maturity and confidence a couple weeks later, providing responses to Gell’s questions and outlining her own ideas and goals.

About a week after their follow up conversation, Gell heard that Deep Space Systems, a major corporation that works with NASA, was looking for interns over the summer. Gell connected them with her former fangirl and, after several stages of screening, Rachel ended up with an aerospace internship.

Not a bad way to spend the summer before heading off to college.

With the pace of life in the highly competitive aerospace industry, you can imagine that a rocket scientist’s schedule is very tight. But when Gell talks about why she commits three days to judging this competition every year, you can hear the emotion in her voice.

“I’m in a position where I can positively change the future,” she says. “I love helping FIRST prepare these kids so they can go on to do the same thing.”

The journalist and the girl who failed Maggie Rossiter Peterman, the Regional Director for FIRST Wisconsin, has been organizing robotics competitions for four years. A newspaper journalist for over thirty years, Peterman first heard about the program and its impact on students— especially girls—while researching a story she was pitching to the Wisconsin State Journal. Peterman was drawn further and further into FIRST by the inexorable pull of the people and their passion for the movement. When the opportunity came along, she made the jump from regional reporter to regional director.

Among her myriad responsibilities at FIRST Wisconsin, Peterman helps organize and run the Wisconsin Regional Tournament every year. With around sixty high school robotics teams competing and an annual budget of just over $200,000, the Wisconsin Regional at Cellular Arena is a pretty massive undertaking. But it is important to note that it is only one of 98 FIRST events just like it staged around the country every spring.

Peterman always seems to have time to share why she loves this program, adding that she would like to see it keep growing year after year—even if that means even more work for her and the many volunteers. For her, the biggest impact of the program is not necessarily related to STEM at all.

“FIRST helps to teach students to become survivors not victims,” she says. “They learn to celebrate 20% success. That’s a good day. They learn to build on that success so that next time it may be 40%. They learn to become resilient when things go wrong, which goes miles in building their confidence. And they not only learn to use power tools, they learn teamwork and Gracious Professionalism [a key concept in FIRST]. Just think: If we all possessed these qualities, what a great world this could be!”

Of course, as you might expect, Peterman also has a story about a young woman whom she met and talked with at the

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national championships in St. Louis this year. The young woman recounted how in her first year of FIRST competition, when she was in 8th grade, her LEGO robotics team came in dead last— which means their robot completed fewer of the small tasks on the competition table than any of the other robots.

The defeat tempted her to give up, but she told herself, “Well, we came in last, so we couldn’t possibly do worse next year,” and she decided to stick it out for one more year. Obviously, having made it to the national championships in her senior year of high school means she did more than just “stick it out for one more year,” and the same young woman who “failed” will be attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the fall with a full scholarship. She explained to Peterman that when she added up all the scholarships that she was offered at the schools to which she had applied, the total was almost half a million dollars.

The student who became a mentor The last story I want to share with you is my own. It’s a story about Aly from FRC Team 1732—the team for which I am the lead mentor on the non-technical side of things.

In addition to being a leader for the mechanical sub-team this past year, Aly Myszewski was our team’s nominee for the prestigious Dean’s List award from FIRST. This award is a recognition of how well a student reflects all that is best about being part of a robotics team—from hands-on engagement with the design and maintenance of the robot to role modeling for younger members of the team and beyond that to their role in community education and outreach.

I asked Aly on the opening morning of the Wisconsin Regional if she still gets excited every time or if, as a four-year veteran of the team, it just feels a little ho-hum at the beginning of a tournament. She lit up like a spark, “Oh, no way, I still get completely excited; it’s hard to fall asleep the night before!”

During the tournament, Aly had a chance to share with the judges what it has meant to her to publish scientific research in a medical journal while still only in high school—the results of an elective research project—and how important it is for her to be a role model, the kind of person that she remembers looking up to when she first joined the team. Aly also shared her postcollege ambition: to create an organization that develops networks to better connect biomedical engineers, equipment, and resources in underdeveloped countries in the effort to support and save human lives.

At the end of the tournament, Aly’s team was one of the three members of the winning alliance (robots compete in three-on-three matches, and each group—consisting of robots from three different high-school teams—is called an alliance).

But when the awards were given out, Aly was not called to the stage as the winner of the Dean’s List award. For a young woman with a list of accomplishments like hers to not win says a lot about the caliber of current and future leaders that FIRST produces year after year.

Her reaction when I talked to her a few weeks later says even more: “At first, I was obviously really disappointed, because I

Aly Myszewski, leader for the mechanical subteam for FRC Team 1732, works on the team robot at the 2014 Regionals Photo courtesy of the author

wanted to be recognized for all my hard work and accomplishments. But then I realized that I had been recognized for those things—by my team-mates and the mentors who have worked side-by-side with me.”

She went on to say, “And when I reflect back, I really don’t think I would remember the individual award—whether I won or lost. I’ll remember celebrating with the team for winning the tournament, and the looks on their faces when we won the Chairman’s Award [the most prestigious in FIRST, awarded for a team’s outreach and education initiatives] at the Midwest Regional a couple weeks later. These memories are way more valuable to me.”

These are memories she will take with her as she heads off this fall to Boston University, having received an impressive scholarship package, to pursue her passions for medicine and biomedical engineering. Like many of our team alumni, Aly will probably be here at the regional again next year, taking a break from college, cheering at the top of her lungs for the students following in her footsteps.

••••• A glimpse into the experiences of these women tells us what stories of resilience and inspiration the thousands of other people who participate in this “varsity sport of the mind” might share.

Anything that we can do, that you can do, to cultivate and nurture STEM opportunities like FIRST Robotics, helps to make sure that these glimpses of the future become the norm and that these young people—especially young women—step into positions that allow them to then push the next generation and their future even further.

For more information about FIRST and its range of programs, please visit usfirst.org. Z

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Along The

e n o t s w o l l e Y Trail y A L b y C arl C ore A P h oto J O U R N

lments, I walked the and in multiple instal d rio pe r ea o-y tw a r ve ed in h W isc on sin . Es ta bli sh ug ro th ail Tr ne to ws 48 0-m ile Ye llo —the first route for automobiles ist ur to try un co sscro 1913 as a ail at on e tim e s— th e Ye llo ws to ne Tr te Sta d ite Un e th in of its kin d d in the west, running the east to Puget Soun in ck Ro uth mo Ply ed tru cti on connect ng th e wa y. Its co ns alo es iti un mm co of th ro ug h hu nd re ds ns wo rk ing wi th ma inl y loc al cit ize e, ris rp te en te iva pr wa s a lar ge ly walking routes. trails, farm roads, and rt ca ox ing ist ex k lin together to tem in the 1930s, the interstate highway sys e th of nt ve ad e th With il is fragmented, with the o decline. Today the tra int l fel il Tra e ton ws llo Ye for segments re complete and cared mo the of e on ing be n Wisconsin sectio across America. of this once great route lk it was based upon tory, my decision to wa his in h ric is il tra e th e ved from Whil hoped to make as I mo I ns tio va ser ob ral ltu the contemporary cu observe what another. I wanted to to wn to sin on isc W one established our current state t only to get a sense of no y— da to e lik are s these town ion. s also the state of the Un mpanied of the State, but perhap d in these images (acco are sh are ns tio va ser Some of these ob te d fro m 11 0 he rs) , wh ich ar e se lec ot m fro d an me m by qu ot es fro walking journal. photographs from my —Carl Corey

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Ph o t o J O U R N A L

4360 – Hudson • The truth is of course that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

4374 – Hammond • Maybe I should just go home and ride my tractor.

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Ph o t o J O U R N A L

4691 – Thorp • Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why you put it up.

4709 – Withee • Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

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4754 – Abbotsford • All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise.

4778 – Colby • Dogs are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.

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Ph o t o J O U R N A L

5389 – Lind • Fathead minnows prefer ponds and slow moving water in streams. They can tolerate muddy water, and are occasionally found in roadside ditches.

5575 – Black Wolf • The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

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5594 – Black Wolf • I often have deer on my property and there’s a fox and owls. You’re not going to see that in the city.

5674 – Eden • Manifest Destiny.

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5695 – Campbellsport • If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.

5751 – Cedarburg • When it gets down to it, basketball is basketball.

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5865 – Milwaukee • I grew up playing in an alley on the south side of Milwaukee.

5983 – Somers • If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

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ESS A Y

To Creation and Beyond: The Remarkable Life of Leslie Lemke b y D arold A . T reffert

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n a warm summer night in June of 1980, Leslie Lemke gave a piano concert in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. That concert was my introduction to an extraordinary man and his surprising talent.

Leslie’s talent stems from a rare but remarkable condition called savant syndrome in which a person with an underlying disability such as autism or other central nervous system illness or injury also has some extraordinary ability that stands in stark contrast to their overall handicap.

I’ve been engaged in savant syndrome research since 1962, writing and publishing widely on the subject, participating in numerous broadcast and documentary productions, even consulting for the movie Rain Man. Today I’m a research consultant on autism at St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac. But I was working in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health when I got to know Leslie and his incredible story.

Leslie was born in 1952 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Because of his premature birth, Leslie developed retinopathy and had to have his eyes surgically removed during the first several months of life. A profoundly ill baby, Leslie was not expected to live more than a few months. He was given up for adoption by his mother and placed in the care of May Lemke, a nurse-governess, in a sort

of hospice-type arrangement. But May Lemke was determined that Leslie would live. And live he did.

Leslie grew up blind and cognitively disabled. Yet, although he has never had a lesson in his life, Leslie’s piano skills are innate and extensive. While Leslie has spasticity in his hands, which makes it difficult to even hold eating utensils, that spasticity disappears when he sits at the keyboard. Leslie can play back a musical piece of any length flawlessly after hearing it once. In fact that is what caught May’s attention late one night when he played back Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 after hearing it for the first time on the sound track of a movie he had listened to with his family earlier that evening. It was then the miracle of Leslie’s talent came into “full bloom,” according to May. Savant syndrome and innate talent

Today, Leslie’s musical repertoire seems bottomless and his talent endless. Having once heard a piece, he simply never forgets it.

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ESS A Y

Savants are not mere tape recorders or copy machines. They can improvise with originality and create something entirely new.

Leslie Lemke and Mary Parker during a performance in 2011.

It seems incredible—until we begin to consider how rare his talent truly is.

Savant syndrome affects males four to six times more frequently than females, and skills typically occur in five general areas: music, art, calendar calculating, mathematics or mechanical/visual-spatial skills. Whatever the skill, it is always associated with massive memory of a habit or procedural type—very narrow but exceedingly deep within the confines of the special skill. In some cases massive memory itself is the special skill.

While admittedly based on a subjective scale at this point, savant skills lie on a spectrum of abilities. Most common are splinter skill savants who have obsessive preoccupation with and memorization of music and sports trivia, birthdays, license plate numbers, historical facts, train or bus schedules, navigation or maps. Talented savants are those in whom musical, art or other special abilities are more conspicuous not only in contrast to individual limitations, but also in contrast to peer group abilities whether disabled or not. Prodigious savant is a term reserved for those extraordinarily rare individuals in whom the special skill is so outstanding that were it to be seen in a non-impaired person such a person would be termed a prodigy or genius.

Such is the case of Leslie Lemke who, by now, the reader of this article might recall hearing about or seeing along with his mother May on one of their many television appearances during the 1980s. Some might recognize their marvelous story of love and hope from the 1983 movie The Woman Who Willed a Miracle in which Cloris Leachman played the role of May Lemke.

Leslie first gained national attention after his 1980 concert when the story of May Lemke and her remarkable son was covered on a special Christmas edition of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. A slew of appearances and performances soon followed: 60 Minutes, That’s Incredible, The Oprah Winfrey Show (three times), and subsequent rounds of many other TV talk shows. Leslie began to book concert hall appearances and, during the 1980s and 1990s, he toured in Norway, Japan, and in cities throughout the United States.

At this time savant syndrome was still a little known phenomenon. It was Dustin Hoffman who put savant syndrome in the international spotlight. Moved to tears by Leslie’s performance

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on 60 Minutes, Hoffman played the lead role of Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. While Rain Man was a marvelous movie—accurately and sensitively done—it left viewers with the impression that, like Raymond, all savants are autistic. In reality, approximately one in ten people with autism has some degree of savant skill and approximately one out of 1,400 people with mental retardation or central nervous system deficits other than autism have savant skills. As such, savant abilities are not limited to autistic disorder. Hence not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic.

Indeed, there are other savants like Leslie who have astounding musical abilities. About the time of the Civil War Thomas Bethune—known popularly as “Blind Tom”—traveled the globe and became the most highly celebrated black concert artist of the time. His story is remarkably similar to Leslie’s in that Bethune was blind and cognitively disabled, but his musical genius exploded on the scene, untrained, as a child.

Like Leslie, Bethune also sang, had an incredible repertoire of over 7,000 pieces, and eventually composed his own pieces, including some as long as twenty pages. Separated by a century in time, their stories parallel each other remarkably. What separates Leslie from other present-day musical savants is that he not only plays piano, but also sings in a beautiful baritone voice and creates his own songs and lyrics, all in the absence of any formal musical training.

I have had the privilege of seeing and hearing Leslie for over thirty years now, and he is a continual reminder of the beauty of music; the power of love; the strength of faith; the tenacity of belief from family, friends, and caregivers; and the depth of human potential—a potential sometimes hidden at first.

From replication to improvisation to creation

Even today, Leslie can still play back—and sing—nearly any song that an audience member might provide as a challenge. It is almost impossible to “stump Leslie,” however hard people may try. But if it is a song Leslie has never heard before, you will get a song anyway. He will make one up on the spot, lyrics included.

If Mary presses Leslie as to whether in fact he performed the requested song or not, Leslie will often answer with a confession: “I’m making it up,” he’ll sheepishly say. So he composes on

ESS A Y

the spot, often in a very witty way. Leslie also composes his own songs, such as “Down on the Farm in Arpin” or “Bird Song” in which he imitates the birds he loves to listen to, cleverly weaving their songs into his own.

In creating these songs and incorporating elements of bird song and other localized sensations, Leslie demonstrates a transition I have seen in other savants as well. Whether playing back a song just heard or drawing an entire city—building by building—after a thirty-minute helicopter ride, this process begins with remarkable memory repetition.

But savants become bored with such precise repetition, stunning as it is. So they begin to improvise. Leslie will play back a song dutifully, for example, but after completing it will then launch into a five or ten minute “variation on the theme” concerto, beautifully crafted. Other savant-visual artists might place a tree where there was none in the scene, or remove a telephone wire that seems to interfere with the picture.

After improvisation comes the creation of something entirely new, such as Leslie composing on the spot while sitting outside like he loves to do on his little farm—or during his live concerts.

In the case of artists with savant syndrome, entirely new and creative paintings, drawings, or sculptures emerge. This transition demonstrates that savants are not mere tape recorders or copy machines. They can improvise with originality and create something entirely new.

The case for multiple intelligences

An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess human intelligence. Leslie has a measured verbal IQ of 58. Performance scales were not used to test Leslie because they heavily depend on performance that is impeded by his blindness. Other tests concluded he was functioning in the moderately retarded range of intelligence.

How does one reconcile these tests with Leslie’s astonishing musical capabilities? I have watched again and again a TV clip of a concert in which Leslie was asked to play a piece of music he had never heard before at the same time that another pianist was playing it (rather than after the pianist completes the piece). Leslie waited about three seconds after the pianist began, and then, while continuing to listen (input), he processed the music and played back (output) what he had just heard seconds before. Leslie was parallel processing, just as some translators are simultaneously able to do as someone speaks, rather than pausing to translate their words or sentences in short bursts. This kind of parallel processing does not occur when a person’s IQ is only 58.

Leslie and many other savants I have met make a persuasive case for multiple intelligences. Intelligence quotient is a useful tool for measuring standard intelligence. But savants, 70% of whom have IQ below 70, also show what I perceive to be musical intelligence, artistic intelligence, or mathematical intelligence, to name several forms. And there are other types of intelligence as well in all of us, in my view, as others have proposed as well.

Equally striking, however, is the fact that these forms of intelligence in savants are there innately. They come “factory

installed.” Clearly Leslie, and many other savants, know things they never learned in the sense of learning that you and I might recognize. To me, the only mechanism that makes this possible is a kind of genetic memory or ancestral memory. Such memory is the genetic transmission of not only skills and abilities, but also the inherited knowledge accompanying those skills such as the “rules” of music, art, or mathematics.

Savants seem to inherit the nature part of the genius equation. Nurture, then, contributes mightily to the advancement of their skills and abilities. I discuss genetic and ancestral memory at length in a chapter titled “Savant syndrome: A compelling case for innate talent” in Scott Kaufman’s recent book The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent and Greatness.

My convictions about the presence of genetic memory—a little Leslie Lemke, perhaps, in all of us—has been reinforced by the surfacing of dormant talent in the acquired savant following some sort of central nervous system trauma or disease. I discuss such cases in an article titled “Accidental Genius” in the August 2014, issue of Scientific American.

Leslie today and tomorrow

Leslie is alive and well today, and still playing marvelously, in North Central Wisconsin. He lives with Mary Parker, May’s daughter, who has lovingly taken on the caregiver role after May died in 1993. Leslie could have been a millionaire, but instead Leslie and Mary live a very modest lifestyle in an aging home in Arpin. Mary feels, as did May, that Leslie’s gift of music is a miracle that should be shared unselfishly with others without undue gain or exploitation.

Today Leslie is more verbal than ever before, more musically accomplished, and, increasingly, more creative and witty. His transition from replication to improvisation to creative ability has been impressive, and is a blueprint for similar progress I have seen in other savants—especially if one observes them over enough time rather than as a single snapshot.

Some fear that savant skills might somehow disappear as suddenly as they appeared. This has not happened to Leslie, nor to any of the other savants I have had the privilege to follow.

And, just as with the other savants, family encouragement, unconditional love, patience and belief are vital ingredients to growth and progress in these extraordinary people. Interested readers can learn much more about Leslie, May, and Mary, and savant syndrome in general in my 2010 book Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired and Sudden Savant or by visiting savantsyndrome.com.

Leslie returned to Fond du Lac in April of 2011 for his “And Sings My Soul” concert at Marian University and I visited Leslie and Mary just this month at his favorite summer camp.

I am pleased to report he is as talented, vibrant, vigorous, and special as ever. There is much to report about Leslie these days, all of it good. We are lucky to have this remarkable man in our midst, so close by. He is truly an inspiration and a Wisconsin treasure. Z

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Photo credit: Photographer unknown. Reprinted by permission of Wisconsin Historical Society

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Paul Vanderbilt: Recombinant Iconographer B y L ewis Koc h

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urator, photographer, librarian, archivist, Monuments Man, teacher, philosopher, flaneur, iconographer—Paul Vanderbilt was all these things. No matter what his specific role in life and work, primarily, and most distinctively, he was a proselytizer for “the notion of

photography as an alternative ‘language.’ ” It was Paul’s talent as meta-librarian—organizing vast troves of visual material and then parsing the ideas and interpretations therein—that lead Roy Stryker of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration Historical Section (later the Office of War Information) to hire him to arrange and classify the Section’s photographic collection. When the largely uncharted collection of FSA-OWI photographs was transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944, Paul went with it as Curator of the newly formed Prints and Photographs Division. He transformed this monumental photographic survey into an innovative historical resource, today treasured as much for its ability to suggest surprising connections and new directions for study as for the many indelible images the survey contains.

Paul remained at the Library of Congress until 1954, when he left to join the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where he established its Iconographic Collections. There, he continued his intuitive, unorthodox approach to organizing the enormous miscellany of visual materials. In the course of his remarkable career, Paul revolutionized the way this miscellany can be seen and understood—and, in doing so, turned the archival process into an art form of its own.

It was only toward the later part of his career that Paul became a photographer himself. I came to know him late in his life and early in my own photography career. This was in the late 1970s and by then Paul had assumed legendary, if largely unheralded, status in the realm of iconography (see page 37 for his definition of the term)—a field which he helped to establish in his various roles as archivist, photographer, and teacher.

This was a time when photography was achieving a certain amount of fashionable acceptability, even prominence amongst an increasingly image-savvy public. Yet decades before Marshall McLuhan and a slew of public intellectuals began to contemplate a widening construct of image interpretation, Paul had been presenting the case for a photography where answers are never so important as the prompting of questions.

“I want to argue that photography is not just for photographers,” he wrote in a 1978 article titled, “A Few Alternatives,” for The Massachusetts Review. In this article Paul staked his claim that it is not necessary to produce pictures in order to practice photography. “The making of the tangible paper photograph is but its birth, the beginning of its life as a picture,” he wrote, “what follows more significantly is among those who see that picture and in the eventual collective, generative power to which it contributes.”

Rather than making portfolios or work in series (as was current practice at the time, and still is), through the practice of iconography Paul demonstrated the diverse ways in which photographs could interact with one another as metaphors for a wider understanding of the world and things seen. Paul augmented this “generative power” by using text in tandem with his photographic arrangements, creating thematic panels that suggested novel ways of considering large arrays of images.

In the introduction to his unpublished memoir, Paul wrote that “we are all collectors of unnamable unities both of the material things attached to our personalities and, more poignantly, of experience and the innumerable details, originally disparate, that are joined to form our memories and take on a community with their association with each of us. … This reshuffling and re-creating does not lead to statistical knowledge, but, with or without incantation, it too is powerful magic.”

Paul was a quiet raconteur, and the assuredness with which he spoke his opinions was not to be taken lightly. He always gave me the impression that our friendship was one of mutual regard, though I clearly remember feeling a respectful distance, being undeniably in awe of his years of experience and gained wisdom in the many areas of our shared interests.

His handwritten list of “What Went Wrong in Photography” (on the facing page) was something he had enumerated for one of his lectures, and which he bequeathed to me as both a manifesto and (I suspect) an admonition. It remains in my personal

OPPOSITE PAGE: (left) Paul Vanderbilt’s thematic pairing 042, reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and (right) Vanderbilt’s handwritten list of “What Went Wrong in Photography” (ca. 1978), provided by Lewis Koch.

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archive a treasured document, clear evidence of Paul’s incisive intellect. His list is revealing, as much for what it contains as for what it does not.

As a more extended testament, his posthumously published book Between the Landscape and the Other (Johns Hopkins, 1993) presents the fundamental and ground-breaking Paul Vanderbilt: audacious in his claims, certain in his methods, and innovative in his use of the photographic image. In Between the Landscape and the Other, Paul describes how he selects and organizes photographs for display and explains his own approach to landscape photography, all the while providing ongoing commentary on art, photography, landscape, language, psychology, values, and much more. While Paul passed away during the final stages of the book’s production, it is an elegant summation of his lifelong convictions and a fine introduction to his alternative language of photography.

In looking at the thematic panels (a few of which are reproduced in this article), it becomes clear that Paul was testing and refining the vocabulary for his new language. In these arrangements he was substituting a sensorium of ideas, both visual and textual, for anything more specific or connotative. Through his doubts about prescribed “meaning” and literal “truth,” I came to understand that much of what Paul was advancing was driven by a strong sense of wonder and the sublime: The capacity I most value of all my fortunes, the constant I would be most grieved to lose … is the enjoyment of almost everything I see about me, in some one of the myriad forms of possible enjoyment, many of which are not allied to approval, but, philosophically, to the wonder of being, complete with all its illusions.

CONNECT:

This quote, excerpted from Paul’s Unpublished Introduction (1982), is deeply resonant with incipient ideas I was working on then—and continue to explore today—in photo-assemblage and use of text with images. For me, the gravitational pull of Paul’s intellectual rigor was an undeniable force.

Storytelling and its visual corollary—that of looking around, making images—were the vehicles for what he called, a “fresh endowment of wonder.” In his own photography, Paul was clear-eyed and present in the moment. Yet his single images were not a “decisive moment” so much as a still point, and his photographs are today highly regarded for their artistic vision.

However, the radical nature of Paul Vanderbilt’s ideas has yet to be fully absorbed by image-makers and the viewing public alike: specifically, that the piecing together of disparate moments leaves open the possibility of engendering further questions and new directions of thought.

For Paul, in his recombinant approach to visual materials, answers were never so important as the prompting of questions. He argued for leaving the “front and back [open for] another question. … [As such] we may have to conclude that meaning is by nature elusive, say ‘No’ to those who insist, and settle for whatever charge is felt from the original intuition.”

Paul recognized that pictures happened in many and various ways, whether by intention or happenstance, and that they in no way represented any one thing. Mutable, obscure, reflective, neither mirror nor window, but perhaps both— The life of a picture begins when it is finished and what happens to it at that point on out is both more important and more interesting than the circumstances of its meaning coming into being. Z

Paul Vanderbilt exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery

The Archive as a River: Paul Vanderbilt & Photography On view September 12–November 2 James Watrous Gallery at Overture Center for the Arts, Madison Developed in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, this Watrous Gallery exhibition explores how archivist and photographer Paul Vanderbilt (1905–1992) created new ways of understanding the world through visual images. This exhibition is free and open to the public.

Related Events Sunday, September 14, 1–4:00 pm at the James Watrous Gallery Exhibition opening reception with curator’s talk at 1:30 pm followed by readings from poets Mark Kraushaar, Sara Parrell, and Thor Ringler.

Sunday, October 5, 2:30–4:00 pm at the James Watrous Gallery Informal gallery talk with photographer and scholar James Rhem.

Saturday, October 18, 1:30–3:00 pm at the Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, Madison Panel discussion with historian Jack Holzhueter, WHS curator Andy Kraushaar, and Wisconsin Death Trip author Michael Lesy; moderated by Watrous Gallery curator Martha Glowacki.

Thursday, October 30, 1:00–2:30 pm at the James Watrous Gallery Informal gallery talk with photographer Lewis Koch.

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Paul Vanderbilt, Pauquette Park, Portage, Columbia County, Wisconsin, 1962.

Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #10490. Reprinted by permission.

Paul Vanderbilt, Sunrise in fog, Wauzeka, Crawford County, Wisconsin, 1961.

Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #10442. Reprinted by permission.

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GALLERIA

Paul Vanderbilt, Farm in the Upper Mississippi River Country, Buffalo County, Wisconsin, 1963.

Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #10471. Reprinted by permission.

Paul Vanderbilt, Wagon in field, Daleyville, Dane County, Wisconsin, 1967.

Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #26817. Reprinted by permission.

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Selections from

“Iconography: Definition and Interpretation,” by Paul Vanderbilt On the fourth floor of its building in Madison, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin maintains a vast conglomeration of photographs, lithographs, paintings, drawings, post-cards, lantern slides, and some motion pictures which, together with sundry graphic ephemera, are termed the Iconographic Collections. This term is apparently unfamiliar to many people and therefore in need of clarification.

Let us point out at the outset that iconography is not an esoteric name for “picture file,” but a recognized term of long standing which applies to a particular use of pictures, especially appropriate to historical interests. Icon is the Greek word for “image” or symbolic visual representation, which, prefixed to the wholly familiar -ography forms a specific term, scientific if you wish, to occupy a place among its polysyllabic relatives like geography, topography, ethnography, and hundreds of other -ographies, familiar and unfamiliar according to our individual interests, professional concerns, and reading. …

Let us approach the meaning of iconography by reference to a familiar analogous word: bibliography. For this latter term there are indeed many definitions and usages, but without entering upon professional controversies, we are safe in saying that its most familiar connotation is a list of published books and articles all of which concern some stated point, a list which is therefore useful in determining what has been written on some subject. …

Now biblia, as everyone knows, is the Latin word for books— any books; and The Bible is so termed, simply out of respect, as The Book. Bibliography, unless so qualified, is not the listing and study of Bibles, but of biblia, or books in general. By the same token, to clear up one misconception, iconography is concerned with images in general and not, unless so qualified, with what the Greek Orthodox or “Russian” church calls icons (or, more properly, Ikons), the holy images of God (that is, examples of The Image) or of some other Person of the hierarchy.

Hence iconography, as a term approximately parallel to bibliography, means the gathering of images or representations which show some stated subject or person or place or symbol, so that the subject may be studied in the light of the various ways in which it has been recorded by artists and photographers. …

The essence of iconography is, then, the collecting of a quantity of representations of the same or related subjects with a view to comparative study. If it is true, as most people would admit, that good artists are valuable because their sensibilities are acute and they are by their talents able to communicate exceptional and penetrating reactions which stimulate others, it follows that insofar as his works of art have discernible subject matter the artist has something valuable to say about that subject.

By “subject” we do not mean a literal interpretation of the title. Of course, nor to imply that subject matter is by any means the principal point of a work of art. We refer on the one hand to the basic and inexhaustible pool of wonderment from which emotionalized preoccupations spring—the purpose and meaning of life, the conflict of good and evil, love and beauty, dynamics and contrast, and thus ad infinitum—and on the other hand to the obvious fact that, disregarding possible metaphysical objections, three different drawings of, say, a certain street in an identified town do represent that street (though perhaps much transformed by the artists’ interpretations) and therefore provide some basis for knowledge of that place by extending and perhaps intensifying interpretations of our own.

The subject of our iconography in the State Historical Society is, of course, Wisconsin itself. We referred to it affectionately as a “conglomeration” because of the way it has come into being.

It is composed of the item-by-item and lot-by-lot contributions of thousands who have seen something of Wisconsin through as many different eyes.

This composite gleaning and editing has produced an iconography which is an infinitely extended picture of the state in terms of personal experience, of origins elsewhere, of the growth of seeds planted in our fertile soil, of our kind of people, of more than an area—of an idea, a Wisconsin as an ideological whole.

If we were to compose an iconography of the state as it is today by commissioning photographers to travel through the counties and follow an outlined procedure for coverage, we should achieve a result which would have, in comparison with our “conglomeration,” more formal logic but less grace and less broad humanity. The influence of preconceptions as to what is thought to be “important” would be inevitable. A series of sites and monuments, persons and events, scenes of industry and daily living, even one produced by the most sensitive and perceptive of individual artists, would never include the variations in circumstances of picture-making, the accidents and conceits which are necessary to the true reflection of a people and their thoughts.

And for coverage of the past, we have no choice in the matter of production, but only ingenuity and good fortune in discovery to combine with discretion in selection. … An iconography can, of course, never be complete in the sense of including representations of everything which ever happened to everybody; nor is this necessary. Ideally, an iconography assembles enough pictures to exemplify adequately all the significant changes and variations in a pattern of environment and behavior as well as all the more subtly significant changes and variations in ways in which that pattern is observed and interpreted.

This essay originally appeared in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter, 1957–1958). Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Reprinted by permission.

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Paul Vanderbilt, Thematic Panel 297–303, 1965–1967 and 1982–1984. 60 x 18 in. Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #102496. Reprinted by permission.

Paul Vanderbilt, Thematic Panel 85–90, 1965–1967 and 1982–1984. 60 x 18 in. Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID #102466. Reprinted by permission.

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Paul Vanderbilt, Pairing 144. Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

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Photo credit: Kevin Vertucio/Flickr.com

READ WISCONSIN It's time to polish your prose and vivify your verse in preparation for the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas fiction and poetry contests. The contests, which accept submissions from September 15 to December 15, 2014, are open to all Wisconsin residents and students age 18 and over. Send us your best works of fiction and poetry to win up to $500 and other prizes along with publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas, a slot at the 2015 contest reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival, even a one-week residency at Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts in Mineral Point.

We’re pleased to have as lead judges for our 2015 fiction and poetry contests author Nickolas Butler and poet Kara Candito.

Eau Claire author and fiction contest judge Nickolas Butler (right) is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin– Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, was released in March of 2014 to critical acclaim. Called “impressively original” by New York Times book critic Janet Maslin, Butler's story of five childhood friends living in—and

out of—rural Little Wing, Wisconsin, recently received the 2014 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Fiction.

Our lead poetry contest judge is Kara Candito (right), author of Spectator (University of Utah Press, 2014), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Candito, whose poetry has been published widely, is a co-curator of the Monsters of Poetry reading series, a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, and the co-director of Membership for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

The 2015 contests are sponsored by Shake Rag Alley, the Wisconsin Book Festival, and Wisconsin Public Radio.

You can find out more about the 2015 poetry and fiction contests—prize details and complete rules—as well as get to know our lead judges by visiting our contest page at wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

—Jason A. Smith

TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE SECOND PLACE PRIZE-WINNING SHORT STORY FROM OUR 2014 FICTION CONTEST!

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Photo credit: Becks/Flickr.com

Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Short Story Contest

Snow Globe Policy

By Jennifer Sauer

A

n Ellis Island tableau, Victoria mused, as she slowly snaked her way through the airport security queue. Except rather than remove hats to prove a louse-free head, these huddled masses shed their shoes—No plastic explosives in these Adidas!—to await the official clearance that

would place them one step closer to their American Dream: the timeshare in Boca or the weekend in Vegas supplanting their ancestors’ vision of a cold-water tenement and fifteen-hour factory day.

It was her nature, her stock in trade, to make historic comparisons. She did it everywhere, and mostly to an audience of one; she had found that others did not always appreciate these historical connections. Her brother warned that this habit made her seem old and fusty, and she certainly wasn’t old, he reminded her, apparently leaving her fustiness for others to decide. She had simply mentioned to her fourteen yearold nephew as he sat slack-jawed and fist-pumping in front of the TV that his predilection for watching grown men in

super-hero costumes pummel the crap out of each other was just the latest, electronically mediated iteration of what the Roman gladiators had done to the delight of cheering throngs.

While she didn’t think of herself as “fusty,” Victoria conceded that her Nothing new under the sun mantra might be taking its toll on her personal life by draining it of a certain immediacy. So she had signed up for eSoulMate—mostly because of her appreciation for the efficiency of the system: dispense with the mind-numbing getting-to-know-yous

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without so much as getting up from your computer, thereby avoiding the string of bad first dates with their interchangeable pasta dishes and cringe-worthy small talk. Her friends had teased that it seemed wildly out of character for her to try something so trendy—till she reminded them that matchmaking was as old as time. In fact, she had taken to calling eSoulMate, eYenta, first eliciting chuckles, and when she persisted, furtive head-shaking.

So when Victoria announced that eYenta had come through with a match

read WI she wanted to meet in person, no one believed her—not even her best friend in the history department, Ana. “You make fun of thees thervith,” she chastised. “I don’t underthand how you’ve thet athide your irony long enough to determine that theeth one is ethpecial.” Ana of the Castilian lisp specialized in Franco and the authoritarian impulse in Europe. And was decidedly un-fusty. “You’re the only woman in America for whom a speech impediment is a hot accessory,” Victoria liked to tease.

Ever since Ana had spent a Thanksgiving with their family, Victoria’s brother Dennis routinely treated his sister to “helpful” comparisons between her and her colleague.

“You’re a great girl, Vic, but you talk about work all the time. Even when you’re not talking about work, you’re talking about work. Look at your friend Ana—no, wait—I’ll look at Ana. … She’s obviously super-smart and whatnot, but she doesn’t sit around over pumpkin pie going on and on about Mussolini or …”

“Franco.”

“Sure. Franco. Whatever. She talks about stuff everybody can relate to.”

Victoria snorted. “What kind of twit doesn’t ‘relate’ to our history? Where we come from?”

Dennis sighed. “Well, all I’m saying is this twit—and his wife and son—sometimes like to laugh and scratch about the ballgame or just admire the yard. And we don’t feel the need to examine the history of baseball in America or the genesis of the suburban lawn. It’s not that we couldn’t—it’s just, we don’t want to.”

So Victoria supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised when “Get Ana to help you pack” was the only advice her dear brother had to offer when she told him she was flying to Florida to meet her mystery man. Not, “Gee, Vic, are you sure he’s not an ax-murderer?” or “Here’s a list of some good solo sight-seeing spots in the likely event this guy’s a total dud.” No, her brother (who—big surprise—had learned nothing from the ancient Greeks when it came to mixing romance and family) seemed most concerned that his sister get laid.

Victoria felt strangely calm about her uncharacteristic adventure and as they cruised at 35,000 feet she performed a methodical review of exactly what she

knew about this Tom X. Shea. Well, she knew that Shea was pronounced like the stadium and the butter and that the X stood for Xavier, a shout-out to his Catholic forbears—a gesture on the part of his parents that she very much appreciated.

She knew he taught painting in Miami and that his work was starting to get picked up by some galleries—a fact she had learned not through any unseemly bragging on Tom’s part, but thanks to a Google search she had run to ensure he wasn’t on anybody’s most-wanted list. She could gather from the one picture she had seen that he had long hair pulled back in a ponytail and deep, kind eyes. And he was divorced and forty-two—a year older than Victoria.

And that was it. That was the sum total of anything concrete she knew about the man toward whom she was speeding to spend an entire long weekend. Victoria broke her own unwritten rule of hygiene and breathed deeply the recirculated airplane air, then sighed it forcefully out.

She was expert at remembering the past with its long string of disappointing dates and botched boyfriends, but when she tried to see the future, to project herself into it with Tom X. Shea firmly at her side—or anybody else, for that matter— the picture failed to materialize.

Or at least a complete picture.

She had no trouble using the past as a template, so the part of the picture that included her, all alone, chin in hand at her desk in the history department, looking out over the ice-fossilized quad from her office window—that part came through clear as a bell. Her stomach leapt in sudden anxiety over the trajectory she was taking. What she was doing was unprecedented, and if there was one thing Victoria valued and trusted, it was precedent. She had no reason to believe this trip would amount to anything other than wasted vacation time. She second-guessed the wisdom of agreeing to meet on Tom's home turf. True, they were spending the weekend at a resort, not his place, but he would still have the home court advantage.

She wondered with a lurch what this Tom person thought he knew about her.

Had he Googled Victoria? Seen the list of journal articles credited to her name? She could only imagine what he had inferred W i s c o n s i n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Sauer grew up in Ohio and holds degrees in English from the College of Wooster and Georget o w n U n i v e r s i t y. I n a former life, Sauer worked as a writer for a large professional services firm. She currently teaches at EAGLE School in Madison, Wisconsin, where she has lived with her husband and two children since 2001.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Susanna Daniel: The author of “Snow Globe Policy” understands the basics of scene work, right from the start. The character dialogue is sharp, the physical descriptions are timed perfectly and clear in detail, and the movement through the world of the story (on the part of the characters) is always clear. Too, there were several lines that made me laugh out loud.

But I think what stood out for me in this story was the treatment of time: rather than give the reader an exhaustive playby-play description of the entire weekend the narrator spends with the egregious but well-meaning Tom, the author gives us just enough to know how it will go, then lets the narrator span forward in time to the end using her wits and instincts.

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read WI from those titles: Going Native: Sexual Mores of the First European Settlers. Or Fashion and Function in the Shadow of Plymouth Rock. Lord. Disaster loomed.

As the plane began its descent, Victoria worked to calm herself. After all, one of the many advantageous by products of studying the past was the knowledge of how good she had it; when you’re talking plague, war, famine, and pestilence, awkward silences over a Mai-tai really can't compete.

As she rolled her bag up the jet way, she wondered if she would recognize Tom. She doubted he would hold up one of those cardboard limo driver placards.

From the lone photo she had studied, his hair looked pretty long. So unless he had gotten it cut in honor of her visit, she could probably just look for the lone guy with Jesus hair. As a cluster of airport shops came into view, Victoria’s heart hammered a little harder. She self-consciously pushed the sides of her neat bob behind her ears and wiped her free hand on the long floral skirt she had picked out over Ana’s insistence that she “do the Latin thing” and wear something short and leg-baring; Victoria had argued she would wait till later in the relationship to overwhelm the man with her decidedly un-Latin Upper Midwest-cultivated bioluminescence.

Hmm. No one standing expectantly in front of the Terminal D Starbucks; just a harried mother trying to hold her toddler while horsing the lid off a cup of yogurt.

She pulled her bag out of the traffic stream and looked around. She would positively refuse to so much as entertain the notion that he had flaked out—for another five minutes, anyway.

And then, just inside the bookstore, she saw him—or his back anyway, recognizable by a long brown braid against a gray t-shirt. The braid was surprisingly appealing—especially on a man completely engrossed in a book. So far, so good. She breathed deeply and gave her hand one last furtive skirt-wipe before this man would grasp it for the first time.

Already she could tell his hands would be dry and very strong. She adopted a pace that she hoped bespoke confidence while downplaying the stalkeresque quality of her approach. Stepping next to him at the “Staff Picks” table, Victoria pushed down

her bag handle with an attention-getting click.

No response from Literary Samson, who remained absorbed in his book.

Oh, the awkwardness. Grabbing randomly at a book for a prop, she turned toward him and cleared her throat. “Good book?”

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Oh, the awkwardness. Grabbing randomly at a book for a prop, she turned toward him and cleared her throat. “Good book?”

For a brief second she feared he hadn’t heard her, or worse, was ignoring her. But he slowly raised his head, and as though returning from 20,000 leagues under the sea, gradually brought Victoria into focus.

A smile slowly dawned across his face.

“Victoria,” he stated. As though finding her here in just this way were simply the anticipated natural order of things, but no less pleasing for it.

“Tom,” she replied, offering a hand, which he clasped, but only as leverage to lean over and gently kiss her cheek.

Yikes, Victoria thought, the blood pounding in her face. Definitely no precedent for this.

Sensing her agitation, Tom drew their attention to the book clutched in her hand. “From Tabernacle to Top 40: The Rise of the Osmond Family. Good read?”

He raised a good-natured eyebrow. But before she had to defend her dubious pick, he turned and pulled a single flower from the straw hole of a plastic Starbucks cup. “For you. May we open ourselves to one another gradually, beautifully, naturally, just like this lotus flower.”

She choked down the strangled guffaw rising tightly in her throat. She knew she shouldn’t laugh; the look on his face told her he was in dead earnest.

But who talked like that? “Thank you,” I D E A S

she managed, admonishing herself that simple honesty was what had drawn her to his profile in the first place. He gives me these completely guileless—almost childlike—responses to my questions, she had marveled to Ana. When she had asked if he had ever been married, he had written, “Yes, to a woman I will love forever but cannot share my life with. Our values have evolved in opposite directions.”

“Eeth he for real?” Ana had asked incredulously, and then advised Victoria, “You go grab him, or thomeone elth weel!”

He smoothly pulled up the handle of her bag and with the other hand guided her by the elbow back into the pedestrian traffic stream. Glancing over at her occasionally, Tom maintained a smiling silence as Victoria flailed about for something to say. “Imagine! A few short decades ago all those runways, the concrete—all of it was nothing but swamp,” she offered, gesturing toward the floor-to-ceiling observation windows.

“So it was,” he answered. “A great r em i nder t hat t he onl y c o n st a n t i s change.” Again with the unflappable smile.

“Well, this is certainly a change for me, weather-wise,” Victoria chirped as they exited to palm trees and Tom lifted her bag into the trunk of a waiting cab. “I left seven inches of snow and a temperature that probably won’t break twelve degrees the entire time I’m gone.”

She was inane. An idiot. But Tom once again took in the pedestrian dross that driveled from her lips and effortlessly refined it into philosophical gold bouillon.

“Marvelous, isn’t it? The competing realities that can coexist.” He closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sun before ducking into the cab, apparently reveling in the good fortune of his particular competing reality.

Victoria was sweating mightily; whether it was the unaccustomed heat or the herculean effort she was exerting to keep the conversation going she wasn’t sure. She was sure, however, that she was beginning to smell like a horse, while Tom, sitting closer than the cavernous back seat of the cab required, exuded not a smell, but a fragrance: of cedar and some kind of magical essential oil Victoria couldn’t quite put her finger on. As the cab jockeyed its way onto the expressway, Victoria turned her atten-

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{ Book Reviews } tion to the view, hoping her dogged absorption would relieve her of the responsibility to talk. The mile after mile of uninterrupted homogeneous swampland rendered ridiculous her fascination with the scenery. When she couldn’t take a second more of her self-conscious silence she turned back toward Tom, whose gaze, she noted with a visible start, was already fixed on her.

“Sorry,” he smiled. It was a word of pity for her discomfort more than an apology for staring. “I’m probably more comfortable with silence than I should be,” he said. “I spend a lot of time alone, working on my art and in meditation, so I guess I’ve lost the gift of idle chit-chat.”

“Oh, no—it’s fine,” Victoria said.

“Frankly, I probably talk too much. You know academics—it’s all about wielding words.” She tried a light laugh. “ ‘Wielding words.’ What an interesting way to put it. Like weapons.” He paused briefly, apparently in an attempt to probe his eyes directly into her brain. “So do you think there’s an aggression inherent in what academics do? Is there a sort of interpersonal violence you’ve had to get used to?” Oddly, Victoria could hear no judgment in his questions—just curiosity.

“Interpersonal violence,” she parroted, as her mind traveled back to the recent Association of American Historians conference and the murderous rage that had fueled her last day there. “Well, I think any time you have competition among colleagues you have the potential for … hard feelings.”

She inwardly cringed at this hysterical understatement as she recalled how W. Elmore Higgins, that pompous windbag from Columbia, had risen at the conclusion of Victoria’s paper and in his inimitably nasal whine, called into question her entire thesis about the crosspollination between early women settlers and Indian squaws in the realm of functional fashion. She had been so caught off guard by his attack that her response from the podium had smacked of defeat and she had foregone the closing dinner to hole up in her hotel room, gorging herself on room service and watching PBS in her pajamas.

“Hmm,” Tom reflected with what already had become a predictable, even thoughtfulness. “To attempt collegiality

Banning DDT: How Citizen Activists in Wisconsin Led the Way

by Bill Berry Wisconsin Historical Society Press, $18.95 274 pages, 22 b&w photos, 1 map, 6 x 9

Reviewed by Ron Seely In his new book, Banning DDT: How Citizen Activists in Wisconsin Led the Way, Wisconsin writer Bill Berry manages to turn one of the state’s most historic—and perhaps longest—environmental battles into what sometimes feels like a fast-paced thriller.

Seasoned environmental activists know that large-scale campaigns are often marked by long periods of waiting for court decisions, government action, or the completion of scientific studies. So it was with the long fight to get the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, banned in Wisconsin and the rest of the country.

The first shots of the battle were fired as early as the mid-1940s when birdwatchers with the National Audubon Society issued early warnings of bird deaths. The ultimate resolution of the conflict didn’t come until 1972 when the federal government banned the dangerous chemical.

But Berry skillfully telescopes this history, and brings drama and suspense to his tale by using detail to immerse the reader in the early 1960s, when the battle started taking over headlines. The full power of Aldo Leopold’s ecological insights were reaching the general public at this time, and the 1962 release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a salient moment that informed and emboldened DDT opponents in Wisconsin and beyond.

Berry does a good job of placing the DDT campaign in its rightful place in our nation’s environmental history. And he does an especially fine job of establishing the effort to ban DDT as the foundation for much of Wisconsin’s modern environmental activism.

The battle over DDT saw the emergence of several now-familiar organizations and names in the state’s natural resource firmament. Important advocacy groups, such as the Citizens Natural Resources Association, came into their own, as did future leaders on natural resource issues like University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers Hugh Iltis and Joseph Hickey, for example, and so many others who would continue to stir things up in Wisconsin for years to come.

In many ways, Berry’s recitation of this story is a familiar one. But, in this case, David is going up against multiple Goliaths: the very powerful pesticide industry, a university where researchers relied upon millions of dollars from the pesticide companies to fund their research, and a state in which agriculture is zealously protected as a key part of the economy.

Berry correctly zeroes in on two aspects of this fight that would turn the tide against DDT: the fierce dedication of grassroots activists and the diligence and courage of scientists who patiently built the scientific case against DDT. The threat posed by the pesticide first came to light when ordinary citizens took it upon themselves to confront government officials over a frightening development— robins and other songbirds dropping to the ground in their backyards, twitching and dying after DDT applications to treat ailing elm trees.

In the Milwaukee suburb of Bayside, housewife and birdwatcher Lorrie Otto was horrified. A long-time gardener and expert on native plants, Otto did not waste any time in making the plight of the dying birds a public one: she dropped off a load of twenty-eight dead robins at the Bayside Village offices (it would be the first of many such deliveries).

So many other birdwatchers took up the cause that pesticide proponents began talking about all the “old-lady birdwatchers in their tennis shoes.” It was a pejorative label that the citizen activists eventually adopted with a certain amount of pride. Years

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read WI based on competition. An oxymoron, really, don’t you think?”

To Victoria’s relief they appeared to be pulling up to the resort. The only way she knew how to engage in the sort of intellectual discussion toward which Tom was pulling her was to debate— argue to win. And her gut was telling her that to use such tactics now would be a colossal error. Unfortunately, what she was supposed to do instead remained shrouded in a swampy Florida fog. So she settled on an uncharacteristically chipper, “Oh! This must be it! It seems very … small,” belatedly hoping her description didn’t seem ungracious.

“Yes,” Tom replied, unfazed. “Its size is part of its eco-ethos.”

Eco-ethos? thought Victoria. He sounds like Ana. “And I have to admit,” he continued.

“And I hope you’re okay with this—but I was a bit selfish in choosing this place: it has the country’s longest continuously running meditation group. So any time, day or night, you can wander out to the zendo and find someone in sitting meditation. I’d love it if you’d join me,” he added, a bit shyly.

“That sounds … interesting,” Victoria replied, trying desperately to conceal the panic that seized her innards when she thought of sitting in total silence and staring at … what? A white wall? The insides of her eyelids? God, the horror. If she could somehow finagle a way to stare at Tom the whole time, it might be worth the existential nightmare, but she seriously doubted the … Zen Master? Silence Keeper? … would allow such frivolity.

As they approached their bungalow, Victoria’s misgivings momentarily lifted as she absorbed the otherworldly beauty of the place. She squinted up through the deep-green vegetation to catch a glimpse of the feathered or furred creature squawking its greeting from the canopy. Tom offered, “They built this whole complex without cutting down a single tree. And they have their own waste treatment facility—not that we have to explore that too fully—unless you want to.”

Victoria yelped a nervous little laugh.

“No, no that’s okay. This is really beautiful. It’s probably the closest we can come to experiencing what old Florida

was like—you know, in the ancient PreRetireezoic Era.” Tom chuckled amiably and grabbed her hand. “Come inside. I want you to see where we’ll stay.” He pushed open the wooden door into a smallish, roundish room furnished with two twin beds, a rattan bedside table and two cushioned rattan chairs. The concrete floor was adorned with a simple woven throw rug. A straw broom rested in the “corner” behind the door. “We do have our own bathroom,” he offered hopefully.

“With a composting toilet and a solar

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As they approached their bungalow, Victoria’s misgivings

rience in any number of ways. And we’ve chosen this. Thank you. It’s a gift I won’t squander, I promise.”

As if yanked by some neurotic elastic band, Victoria popped to standing, whacking her kneecaps against his. “Ouch!

Oh! Sorry! So … composting toilet! How does that work, exactly? Sort of an indoor outhouse?”

She marched a purposeful two steps over to the minuscule bathroom and peeked her head in. Hearing no response, she glanced back over her shoulder. Tom remained stock still, perched on the bed with perfect posture, only now his eyes were closed. After a few more uncomfortable beats of silence he slowly opened his eyes and, ignoring her question, rose to standing. “Should we check out the beach?” His voice was light, but Victoria detected a tiredness in his eyes.

momentarily lifted as she absorbed the otherworldly beauty of the place. shower. And I’m told these twins can be converted to a king pretty easily.” Victoria looked sharply over at him, her Creep Radar suddenly at full attention. But she detected no innuendo, no inappropriate assumptions; just the facts, ma’am.

Victoria mustered an uneasy smile.

The place was charming but T-I-N-Y. As if reading her mind, Tom sat down on the edge of one of the beds and indicated that Victoria should do the same. She sat down on the bed opposite, her knees awkwardly bumping his. He solemnly took both her hands in his and pressed his knees more firmly against hers. “Victoria.” He uttered her name carefully, like some sort of exotic incantation, as though unintended consequences could result from merely tossing it around. “We are giving each other a remarkable gift.”

Oh, are we now? Victoria thought, an inner eyebrow rising sky-high. But before she could muster any pseudo-virginal protestations, he continued. “It’s the gift of three precious days—three days of nows that we could have chosen to expeI D E A S

Tiny geckos skittered to safety as they hiked the path to the beach, and the only sound to relieve the awkwardness was the distant cries of birds. “Did you know that early Spanish settlers thought the iguanas they saw were immature dragons?” Victoria blurted. “But then once they’d been here long enough to realize they weren’t getting any bigger or more ferocious, people began keeping them as pets. They became a status symbol of sorts.” Tom simply nodded his head, so she continued with a knowing chuckle, “It makes me think of the problem Florida has today with people keeping exotic animals that then escape into the wild.”

“Yes, I suppose it is a bit like that,” Tom responded, a polite smile turning up the corners of his mouth.

He was certainly courteous, but Victoria was already exhausted by the burden of keeping the conversation going and wondered a bit peevishly how, exactly, this duty had fallen to her.

“Well, this is it,” Tom announced as they crossed a footbridge over the dunes.

He stretched out his arms as if to embrace some giant sand monster and turned his face to the sky. Despite the breeze blowing across the sweat circles she could see under his arms, the only smell that reached her was the salt air mingling with the same appealing Tom-scent that

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{ Book Reviews } had wafted up to her the moment they met. Impressive.

She stood, arms akimbo, waiting for Tom’s moment of ecstasy to end. “I would love to sit in the sand and watch the sun set,” he announced, his arms dropping abruptly to his sides. “Does that sound okay to you?”

The sun was getting low in the sky, but Victoria guessed its actual flame-out was at least an hour away. An hour, without so much as a margarita or a breadbasket to fiddle with.

“It’ll be probably forty-five minutes or so,” Tom said, apparently reading her mind.

“I would appreciate the uninterrupted time with you … and all this,” he swept his hand toward the horizon, and Victoria worried that he would once again succumb to some kind of beach-induced trance.

But before more gnomic silence could descend, they looked up to the sound of boisterous laughter. Stampeding in their direction came a gaggle of six young children, plastic buckets clattering against their legs, rainbow-hued shovels waving like swords in their hands. Against the enormity of the oceanic backdrop, their little limbs, their tiny pale faces struck Victoria as inadequate to the task. Playing against the greater silences, she thought but for once managed to keep to herself.

She would follow her brother’s advice and assume that Tom wouldn’t want to channel Auden at the beach. But she still marveled at the blithe naïveté of the children’s assumption: that they could traverse that expanse of beach and safely return to their parents.

“We’re being invaded!” Tom quipped.

“There’s a Disney-type resort down the beach a ways and I think it gets pretty crowded,” he surmised, squinting toward the direction from which the children had come. Victoria followed his gaze a bit longingly to where myriad colorful dots lounged on rainbow-hued rectangles on the sand. What from here looked like little fancy-drink umbrellas poked up every few feet. Teeny kites sailed overhead. She imagined the babble of it, the anonymity of the crowd, and she found herself pining for a place she had never been. Not more than ten feet from where Tom and Victoria had sat down the little visitors set to self-organizing, assigning jobs, and getting down to the task of building.

later, when invited to receive an award for her environmental advocacy, Otto would show up in slacks and the trademark tennis shoes.

Equally interesting is Berry’s description of how scientists connected the dots between DDT, thinning eggshells, and declines in bird populations.

Leading the way in Wisconsin was Joseph Hickey, a UW–Madison student and disciple of Aldo Leopold’s. Hickey would spend years building his case, frequently in the face of opposition from his employer. Berry recalls how long-time activist Gene Roark described Hickey weeping as he told Roark that his findings on DDT and bird deaths were being suppressed by the UW–Madison College of Agriculture. Hickey and his students had conducted surveys that showed widespread bird deaths in the wake of DDT treatments. In 1959, for example, Hickey and his students found in a survey that 86 to 88 percent of all robins on campus had been wiped out.

Eventually, Hickey would connect DDT to dwindling peregrine falcon populations, proving that the chemical caused thinning and breaking of eggshells in the nest before young could be hatched. The same phenomenon would be connected to precipitous drops in populations of other raptors, such as bald eagles.

All of these various components of the DDT story should sound very familiar to those in Wisconsin fighting battles on any number of environmental fronts—from the northern forests, where a giant iron mine threatens the natural resources of the Penokee Range, to the farm fields of central Wisconsin, where residents struggle to protect their water from the explosive growth of huge industrial dairy operations.

Berry’s book is a must read for those engaged in such battles. It is, by turns, inspirational and entertaining. Perhaps more importantly, Banning DDT provides lessons in how to patiently carry on in the face of powerful, entrenched bureaucracies that, whether through inertia or corruption, turn a deaf ear to the ordinary person who finds a dead bird in their yard and wants to know why.

The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Krug Benjamin Atria Books, $15.00, 320 pages

Reviewed by Erika Janik Dreams are mysterious. Sleep can transport us to another life where we have tea with the Queen or swim across an ocean.

These events—no matter how fantastical—seem real at the time because we don’t know we are dreaming.

But what if you did know you were dreaming? The researcher at the center of Chloe Krug Benjamin’s debut novel The Anatomy of Dreams is attempting to teach patients to lucid dream and thereby gain control of their dreaming as a way to cope with traumatic life experiences and subconscious conflicts.

The Anatomy of Dreams follows narrator Sylvie Patterson from boarding school in northern California, where she first meets her boyfriend Gabe, to New England, and, finally, to Madison. Sylvie and Gabe’s relationship doesn’t survive high school and he disappears from her life for several years. When Gabe suddenly resurfaces before her last year of college, Sylvie impulsively decides to leave school to join Gabe as a research assistant in the lab of Dr. Adrian Keller.

A sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Keller has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming as a curative for victims of trauma and other causes of sleep disturbance. A disordered dream state, Keller argues, indicates unrest in a patient’s life that can threaten their mental health.

Keller’s experiments seem benign at first. But, after a young patient who is suffering the loss of his family has a dramatic response to Keller’s attempts to guide him to a lucid state, Sylvie begins to question the ethical implications and effectiveness of

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read WI “How old do you suppose they are?”

Tom asked, an expression of absorbed interest lighting his face. “Look how they just focus on the present moment. How do we lose that ability?” he marveled.

Victoria gratefully grabbed the nonrhetorical question: “I’d guess maybe six or seven.”

Tom, already completely lost in observing the children, glanced at her as if she had just tossed out a complete non sequitur: Y’know, morel season is so short!

“I’d love to join them,” he declared, hopping to his feet and offering Victoria a hand up. “What do you say? What a gift to absorb all that pure, present energy.”

Victoria didn’t know the first thing about pure, present, energy, but she knew an alternative to pure, present, awkward silence when she saw one. Grabbing his hand and leaping up with a vigor that surprised them both, she gamely instructed, “Put me to work!”

Tom’s face melted into a relaxed, open smile that Victoria couldn’t help but notice held a hint of relief. He took the lead, approaching a tall, tow-headed boy who seemed to be more in charge of Project Sand Castle than anyone else. “Hi there— my name’s Tom and this is Victoria. Can we help you with your sand castle?”

The boy dragged his attention away from industrious bucket filling and packing to give the two adults a brief but somehow thorough-feeling once-over.

Apparently deciding they looked harmless enough, he nodded his head and said matter-of-factly, “Sure. But we don’t have any extra buckets. You can collect sticks and stuff for the wall.” “ Gr eat!” T om r esponde d, a lre a dy turning to get started on his task. But Victoria, crouching down to the boy’s level, said, “You know, if you want the castle to be more realistic, like castles in the middle ages really were, you might want to use stones or even stone-like shells for the rampart. They would have never built a rampart out of wood in that time period.”

Without pausing in his work or even looking at Victoria, the boy responded, “We’re making a wall, not a rampart.

We’re going to use sticks. We always use sticks.”

“Oh, well a rampart is another word for—”

Tom interrupted with an uncharacteristically sharp, “Hey, Victoria! Come take a look at this!” His smile as she joined him at the water’s edge morphed into a tight thin line that didn’t reach his eyes.

“What are you doing over there?” he asked. Victoria heard condemnation in the studied non-judgment of his tone and frantically cast about for some inkling as to why he would be upset with her.

“You mean … what do you mean?” she asked, puzzled by the obvious change in Tom’s mood.

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They stood silent, the ocean spread out before them, inkyblack and impartial to their mortal flailing.

“I mean we’re the students here—these children are our teachers. If you start telling them what to do, you’re going to change the energy, and suddenly they’ll be looking to us for direction. We’ll lose the gift of their precious imaginations— and eventually, so will they.”

If Tom actually had it in him to be agitated, Victoria realized she was probably seeing it. How on earth had things so quickly devolved to this level of absurdity? She felt her face redden in righteous indignation. “Actually, Tom, I’m a teacher—and I studied many, many years to become one. That’s a fact you should have picked up just by reading my bio on eYent … eSoulMate.”

Tom backed up a step, closed his eyes briefly, then replied in a hushed tone that Victoria thought better suited to a funeral home, “The best teachers know when to humble themselves and receive wisdom from other teachers.”

His calm hit her with greater force than if he had raged at her, called her names.

And what he was calling her, when it came right down to it, was an insufferable knowit-all. Her eyes stung with tears. “Where’d you read that? A fortune cookie?” she spat.

As soon as the words were out, she knew it was over. Tom would be too I D E A S

good, too pure to walk away from her, to abandon her on the beach. But he was too enlightened to keep banging his head against her expertly constructed rampart.

She waited, breath held, to see how this one would end.

T om s t ood, head bow e d sl i g h t l y , focusing on his toes, which he swept back and forth across the sand. When he finally looked up at her, he smiled. Not a protective, constipated little smile like the one Victoria wore, but an open, friendly beam tinged with sadness. “I’m sorry you felt you had to resort to sarcasm,” he said. “And I apologize for whatever role I played in getting you to that place.”

Eeth he for real? Ana’s incredulity returned to Victoria like a prophecy. The children, noting a change in the light, abandoned their efforts and scampered back down the beach before the sun set, their calls trailing behind them, fading, until the adults were alone, nothing but surf and self-consciousness to fill the void.

They stood silent, the ocean spread out before them, inky-black and impartial to their mortal flailing. For the briefest moment Victoria allowed herself to succumb to the trance-inducing motion of the waves. The repetitive roll, rise, crest, and the inevitable noisy break on the shore—the circumscribed history of a wave—calmed her in its predictability. Or was it numbness that she had begun to mistake for calm? Suddenly she wondered, shipwrecked yet again, observing as if from a distance the predictable rise of her hopes, the foamy, frightening realization that they were higher than reality could sustain, and then their preordained, violent crash onto the unforgiving shards of her expectations.

The rest of the weekend spooled out before her like a movie watched too many times. They would eat, they would drink.

Tom would temporarily abandon his ideals in order to grant her the mercy of small-talk and banter. She would grease the otherwise grinding wheels of time with her wry humor and encyclopedic knowledge. She would even sleep with him, because tempus fugit, and no one has to tell her that her tempus for such comfort is fugit-ing faster than she cares to acknowledge. He would be gallant

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{ Book Reviews } and gentle and good-humored, and would wear his disappointment lightly but visibly, a cashmere hair shirt of dashed hopes. When the weekend finally exhausted itself (and them), he would drop her at the airport with a fraternal kiss on the cheek. She would toss out the requisite “let’s keep in touch” to which he would have too much integrity to respond, other than with a friendly wave.

Methodically emptying her jacket pocket of loose change and Kleenex lint to make her way through security, her fingers close around a smooth orb, tiny and unfamiliar. It is a snow globe—no, a sand globe—tucked into her pocket by the ever-thoughtful Tom as a souvenir.

She pauses by the conveyer belt of shoes and laptops and diaper bags to shake it and finds herself unable to move forward, so transfixed is she by the improbably tiny woman inside the glass bubble. Invincible in her minuscule red bikini, arms raised to the sky, her little face tilts to the imaginary sun as the sand flies, pelting her tender white belly, collecting in the little depressions that stand in for eyes.

“Ma’am? Ma’am!” From behind the conveyer belt, a uniformed woman in latex gloves interrupts Victoria’s reverie.

“You can’t take that on the plane, ma’am.”

Victoria stares back blankly. “What, this?” she asks, doubtfully displaying the gumball-sized sphere.

“Aren’t you aware of our snow globe policy?” the woman demands, in evident disbelief of Victoria’s ignorance.

“Snow globe policy,” Victoria parrots, bursting into hysterical laughter. “Are you aware of the snow globe policy?” she turns to the elderly couple in line behind her, whose alarmed expressions suggest that snow globe-wielding strangers are indeed deserving of special sanctions. She wags her finger at them and, voice shaking, warns with exaggerated concern, “I hope you’re not wielding any snow globes!” Part of her is aware she is making a scene, but something, a rusty hinge somewhere deep inside, has finally given out.

She turns the snow globe in her hand.

Not waving, but drowning, Victoria thinks.

She takes one last look at the tiny lone figure before handing it over to security.

“You could get out of line and mail it to yourself,” the guard suggests. But Victoria is already halfway to the gate. Z

Keller’s research. Her suspicions are further confirmed after a former patient of Keller’s commits a shocking crime.

Sylvie begins to dig deep into the doctor’s history, raising questions about Keller’s method and theories. She’s never had as close and trusting a relationship to Keller as Gabe, and her uneasiness with the research begins to fray Gabe and Sylvie’s relationship.

Sylvie’s discomfort is magnified by her tangled connection with an attractive but mysterious young couple living next door which eventually leads to a startling revelation.

Part thriller and part love story, The Anatomy of Dreams is hard to put down. It’s also terribly difficult to write about the story without giving away key plot points. The overlapping arcs of Sylvie, Gabe, and Keller play out in chapters that jump in time between the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Something that happens in one chapter is often not explained until a later chapter when, either backward or forward in time, the decision or series of leading events is revealed.

Reading The Anatomy of Dreams is little like interpreting a dream, trying to make sense of scattered images and experiences. A person’s dream is rarely as interesting to others as is it is to the dreamer, but Benjamin keeps the story moving forward by doing what we all should do when sharing our dreams: keep the pertinent parts, discard the rest.

Over the course of the novel Gabe doesn’t really become anything more than moody and mysterious, where Sylvie seems to grow and change as she wrestles with the complexities of life in her twenties. Benjamin seems to use Gabe’s stagnation and Sylvie’s transformation to demonstrate how a relationship changes over time, particularly from adolescence into young adulthood, but the characters—as a couple—never seem to gel. Keller, too, is described as a charismatic figure trying to set the world on fire with a new theory of sleep, but he rarely seems anything more than an arrogant and secretive creep with a chip on his shoulder.

Benjamin’s tale raises interesting psychological questions that flirt with science fiction and fantasy. But the novel stops just short of full explorations of or divergences into either of these themes, which makes it more of a thriller than a philosophical treatise on dreaming.

Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham

by Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 410 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Robert H. Dott, Jr. At long last we have a biography of Increase A. Lapham, one of Wisconsin’s most important early residents. He was surveyor, botanist, geologist, antiquarian, meteorologist, limnologist, and all around good citizen. Thanks to Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes, we now have a well-researched and readable account of a true Renaissance man.

Born in 1811 into a large Quaker family of modest means from New York State, Increase Allen Lapham worked on the Lake Erie canals before migrating in 1836 to Milwaukee, where, during a thirty-nine year career, he married, raised a family and matured as a respected scientist and civic leader before passing away in 1875.

Both authors of this biography are residents of greater Milwaukee: Bergland is a retired English teacher and novelist, while Hayes is a retired science writer for the Milwaukee Journal. Through a friend, they discovered a mutual interest in Increase Lapham and decided to join forces to compose an authoritative biography of the man.

Bergland concentrated upon Lapham’s early years, while Hayes focused upon Lapham’s time in Wisconsin. Their greatest challenge was grappling with the magnitude

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Erik A. Evensen is an award-winning designer, illustrator, and graphic novelist, and a professor of Design at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. He is the author/illustrator of Gods of Asgard: A Graphic Novel Interpretation of the Norse Myths (Jetpack Press, 2012), The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay (Evensen Creative, 2013), and Super-powered Word Study: Teaching Words and Word Parts through Comics (Maupin House, 2013), and recently illustrated a short story in IDW Publishing’s popular Ghostbusters series. Evensen holds an MFA in Design from Ohio State, and he studied art at the University of New Hampshire and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Why did you choose graphic illustration as your medium for telling stories?

My love of drawing and illustration is what got me into graphic design in the first place, and comics were a big part of that.

Comics got me into art, which took me to art school, which pointed me at design. As for telling stories, I’ve always been a very visual person, and as a kid I read comics with as much sincerity as I read novels.

Once I discovered what a graphic novel was—a long-form, stand-alone comic book—I knew I found my medium.

I’m an illustrator, first and foremost. My education and training is all in the fine arts, and because of this, it made more sense for me to become a storyteller through a visual format. I was always good at writing, but it’s not nearly as natural a process for me as drawing.

trudging through Lake Bemidji State Park.

I also took a lot of influence from the lake towns in New Hampshire, too, especially visual influence. I’m originally from New Hampshire, and my family owns a lake cabin there. I moved away when I moved to Ohio for grad school, which was when I started to feel like an outsider in my own hometown. That was kind of what I wanted Brian’s experiences to feel like.

Gods of Asgard, your graphic adaptation of selected Norse mythology, and The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay, which is your take on Beowulf, both reflect a deep knowledge of and commitment to mythology.

When did you first begin to “make it your own” through graphic adaptation?

I’ve only been at UW–Stout for a year, so it’s actually just a coincidence. The town of Wolfe’s Bay is meant to be an “everytown” of sorts, and I never actually claimed its location in the book. But it’s based just a little bit on Bemidji, Minnesota, where my wife taught for four years.

I wanted to capture that vibe of a small college on a lake in the woods, and the Upper Midwest is great for that. Much of the plot was actually hashed out while

My family gave me a copy of Edgar and Ingri Parin D’Aulaire’s illustrated Norse Gods and Giants in the mid1980s when I was a kid, partly, I think, to connect me with my roots. My grandfather was Norwegian, but I grew up in New Hampshire, where—unlike Wisconsin— Norwegian wasn’t a very common cultural heritage to have. I was completely fascinated by the book, and as I got older and realized there were more stories out there. I just kept consuming them when I could, and internalized it all.

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I had the idea to adapt the Norse myths into some sort of comic format, and I even drew a few pages. While I drew pretty well at that age, I quickly realized that I was out of my depth. So, I waited until I had attended a couple of art schools before I picked it up again in my mid-twenties.

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Your critically acclaimed graphic novel The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay follows the adventures of a paleo-anthropology grad student named Brian Wegman and is set at an idyllic college that looks strangely similar to UW–Stout. Did you draw any influence from Wisconsin for this tale?

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The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay is the tale of Beowulf, but it’s deconstructed and reassembled in a modern setting. For this book, I decided to make it my own, so to speak, because there were already a few straight adaptations of Beowulf out there.

Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel is sort of the definitive one. I didn’t want to muddy the waters with yet another adaptation, so I decided to take Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead as inspiration and started thinking of ways to take it apart and turn it into something new.

You worked with composer Andrew Boysen Jr. and conductor Erika Svanoe (who happens to be your wife) on an original musical composition that was performed against an illuminated backdrop of your hand-drawn images. How can interdisciplinary collaboration like this expand our understanding of something as archaic as Norse mythology?

Well, “Twilight of the Gods” was a success mainly because of Andy’s outstanding score. He really pulled out all the stops for that one, and I’d say it’s some of the best work of his career. And of all the conductors who commissioned the piece, Erika is perhaps the one who knows the ins and outs of it as well as we do, because she absorbed a lot of the creative process just by living in the same house as me.

The combination of music and motion graphics hadn’t really been done this way before. I mean, it’s been done, but not quite like this. Usually a composer selects a piece of art and writes a response to

Photo credit: UW–Stout

5Q { Erik A. Evensen – Menomonie }

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it, or vice-versa, as kind of a creative exercise. We were really collaborating, working through the story together and reacting to each other’s ideas.

I think that in some ways, these kinds of collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects represent the future of the arts. We often get stuck in thinking that a piece of music has to be a certain way, or visual art has to be presented in a frame or on a wall, and that’s really not true at all.

With “Twilight of the Gods,” we also wanted to create something timeless, a performance that was as much modern as it was traditional. Andy’s musical style and my art style are both rather modern, of course, but the mythology is ancient, and hopefully we were able to give it the gravitas it was due.

I saw that you were co-author of an educational, comics-based textbook called Super-powered Word Study. How can the power of graphic illustration be harnessed for teaching purposes?

Essentially, co-author Dr. James Bucky Carter and I were working with word parts and vocabulary, using the dialogue in the stories to illustrate appropriate word usage through short, engaging comic mini-narratives. The process of composing a narrative forces you to think about storytelling in a step-by-step, procedural way, which is a very important aspect of design. But really, you can do this with any sort of topic. I use this concept when I teach Design Drawing at UW–Stout, and incorporate broader design concepts by working them into the process of drawing sequential narratives.

As for the teaching power of graphic illustration, the big answer is that it is excellent at providing context, which allows the viewer to absorb a large amount of information very quickly.

Readers are presented with information in a clear and sensible way, and get to see it applied without being forced into an uncomfortable or repetitive classroom exercise. As the adage says, A picture paints a thousand words.

of the Lapham archive, thanks to the man’s consummate journal writing and voluminous correspondence. In his earlier years, for example, he and brother Darius wrote to each other daily, and throughout his life, Lapham wrote to countless other people including some of the nation’s leading scientists. He also recorded daily temperature and barometric pressure readings, keeping meticulous notes on sky observations as well as on the annual totals of snow and rainfall.

From where did his fascination with the weather and natural phenomena spring?

When but thirteen, Increase Lapham began working alongside his father and his beloved older brother, Darius, on construction of the western end of the Erie Canal and other transportation canals in Kentucky and Ohio. While each brother had a passion for knowledge, there was neither time nor money for formal education. But their keen observation skills, voracious reading, and association with older, educated men provided a kind of self-education for them.

The brothers collected shells, fossils, and plants and exchanged specimens with many other collectors and bought books as their meager earnings allowed. In 1832 they published an article in the American Journal of Science about the so-called diluvial boulders—boulders thought to be deposited during the Noachian or other great flood— scattered across Ohio. This was thirty years before such erratic boulders would be explained by glacial transport.

Entrepreneur Byron Kilbourn persuaded bright, young Lapham to move to Milwaukee to manage his ambitious ventures in the new Wisconsin Territory. Increase soon married Ann Marie Alcott, began raising a family, and participated in many civic affairs. Lapham’s employment allowed him to travel over the Territory and to observe its geology, botany, and the Native American effigy mounds. Yet in spite of his truly remarkable intellectual accomplishments, Bergland and Hayes note that Lapham’s lack of formal education was a continual psychological burden.

Bergland and Hayes take the reader through Lapham’s major publications such as A Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin (1844) and, Lapham’s most famous work, The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855). Published by the Smithsonian Institution, The Antiquities of Wisconsin presented detailed maps and descriptions of the state’s many effigy mounds.

By this point in his career, Lapham was in touch with prominent scientists such as Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz of Harvard University, Benjamin Silliman of Yale University, and James Hall of the New York State Museum and Geological Survey. Lapham’s recognition of fossils in Milwaukee bedrock similar to those of the Niagara Falls region of New York convinced Hall to visit and to infer the presence of ancient Silurian reefs at Milwaukee. Lapham also travelled east several times to consult with these and other men and to attend a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, thereby developing both national and international reputations.

The deeper one reads into this biography, the more one realizes how central Lapham was to the advancement of science not just in Wisconsin but in the nation. Lapham was the first to document a lunar tide in Lake Michigan. He made systematic meteorological observations and, because of terrible shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, he advocated for a storm warning system, which eventually evolved into the National Weather Service.

In 1870 Lapham joined in the establishment of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters much as he had helped establish many civic institutions for the betterment of the common good, thereby fulfilling his Quaker spirit of public service.

In 1873 Lapham was appointed director of a new Mineralogical and Agricultural Survey of the state only to be replaced abruptly two years later by a political appointee; the new governor was a Democrat while Increase was a Whig (some things never change). In spite of this outrage, the Survey was completed with the publication of four volumes of the highest national and international quality.

I first “met” Increase Lapham as a young geology professor at UW–Madison when I kept discovering older library books with that strange name written inside. I soon discovered that the core of the original University Library holdings came from Lapham’s personal library. As such, I was delighted to learn more from Bergland and Hayes about this unusual man, who was so important to the early development of Wisconsin. Z W i s c o n s i n

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poetry contest

winners

Wild Women in Old Movies

Her Things Become Her

I always wanted to be like the wild women in old movies who have whole storm systems of electric hair, who are earthy and hotten things up and whose great talent is in letting themselves go, go, go. Oh, let it be me, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity with her killer ratio of hip to waist, her hand dangerously gemmed with red-fanged cigarettes.

Raw martinis have turned her guts and voice phosphorescent green and silver. Her rouge burns, irremediable rose through smoke. If you bounced a rock off her adorable pompadour the rock would break. She incites to murder so casually, lets slip that she wants her old man wearing clothes of sand. But my true favorite is

She had been here, and now she is gone, leaving her mark like an imprint in snow.

Her things are still here, but she has moved on.

Dolores del Rio in Bird of Paradise, that scene, that scene when with star-shaped tears and not one word she slowly chews the pomegranate, then puts her lips to the feverish lips of her sailorboy and tongues the fruit into his mouth: one last look: then goes away, doomed, gorgeous, to throw herself into the volcano.

I’d call it a bun, but she said chignon.

I still have her hair clips, pins and bandeau.

Her things are still here, but she has moved on.

I’ve kept her books, from Proust to Audubon, see her freckled hand scribbling notes that show she had once been here, and now she is gone.

Bundt pans, quiche dishes, molds for bonbon— she could bake anything, called cake gateau.

Her things are still here, but she has moved on.

In my closet, her clothing—white chiffon, purple suede, pure silk petticoats—as though she had just been here, and now she has gone.

When I touch what was hers, she returns one moment or two—reminding me how she has been here. And now she is gone.

Her things become mine. But she has moved on.

—Margaret Benbow, Madison —Nancy Jesse, Madison

A special thanks to 2014 poetry contest sponsors Wisconsin Book Festival and Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts, as well as to our contest judges for their support and hard work: Lead poetry contest judge: • Max Garland Preliminary judges: • John Lehman • Jeremy Behreandt

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Crossing Guard when you die this lady named alice but probably karen walks you across the street she’s wearing an orange stocking cap white sam browne belt and black galoshes she carries a stop sign a giant red ping pong paddle she looks left and right then left again holds up her sign to fend off traffic then delivers you just short of the other side safe with your classmates to where maybe your house is or apartment complex or the laundromat where you wait for your father then she says your name like oh max I didn’t see you there have a great day and say hi to your mom for me okay? then alice heads back for the next batch and you think to yourself oh geez I hope I didn’t forget my history book again and that’s pretty much it you see when you die this lady named alice but probably Karen shepherds you across the street —Bruce Dethlefsen, Westfield

Heaven At sixteen, the good kiss relied on pitch-black darkness during the seventeen-mile ride to our dairy farm after we won the basketball game and my point-guard boy danced with me to Oh, Pretty Woman in a dimmed gym— what kinesthesia that dimness held and again in his father’s Ford Fairlane downshifting through country stop signs, the landscape dressed in see-through black underwear, a chocolate sky, our talk tactile and tantalizing while we review a full-court press, mockery over the history teacher in the bleachers desperate to get laid and finally we’re at my half-mile driveway, headlights pick each stone as we inch our way to the farmyard, arriving breathless and expectant; the Ford nestles between the pump house and granary, startled pigeons fly from the silo, two barn cats slither from one hideout to another as his arm reaches for me and we wriggle in, windows steaming, a period of study begun when suddenly the yard backfills with yellow light, a naked 100-watt bulb under a silver saucer high on the cow barn, the switch thrown by my father in his drawers shivering on cold kitchen linoleum.

Within twenty years, that 100-watt bulb would yield to fierce halogens, and jet-black undulations on a rural drive would sallow into urban sky with our earth gone electric and heaven losing its mind.

—Kathryn Gahl, Two Rivers

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Reversal We come into the world and then go out the same, incontinent. It isn’t supposed to be like this, is it? I push you in a chair

Dollar Store Moon Poems

and bend to tie your shoes.

Those were your jobs.

I used to ask why this, why that and now that is you, asking

For just one buck this gaudy one-eyed cheap tin crescent moon is mine, lead painted by some ‘artist’ in Beijing, mysterious mythic glamour brought low by tawdry colors, already chipped, melodramatic, second-rate

and then, not remembering that I sat with you today.

We know why but we can’t face it, that loss of sharpness,

like some poems end up with no nuance, or substance, poor images, no true light of their own, sometimes break upon opening.

that inability to maneuver.

Old age visits us now, an unexpected guest at the table who came with gifts, yes,

So what shall we do with weak poems, our failed intent?

Shall we give them a Dollar Store space near Disney-faced pink ceramic cats, splotchy glued velvet photo frames with dusty pictures of Jesus, grocery list pads in torn cellophane, magic markers already dried up you only find out when your kid opens them and has a tantrum, portable tiny checker games that smell like mildew?

but will not leave until it has its way with you, with us; making everything that ever bothered me about you multiplied a thousand times, along with everything I ever loved.

—Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan

Yes, let’s hear it for low-grade poems: lousy sand-paper-rough Kleenex poems, no-name dishwasher powder poems, sick-green dinner plates with flecks in the clay like tiny flies poems.

Let’s stand up for that kind of poem, something to take home anyway when your days are shabby and cheap, to know you’re still in the game like this low-down Dollar Store moon with her one red eye and survivor smile.

—Louisa Loveridge Gallas, Milwaukee

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Snow Dance The week her grandfather died, she recalled dancing with him at her sister’s wedding, the gardenia, his neatly parted white hair, a tango he likened to snow falling in calm wind.

You were quick to learn, he told her, and she remembers his hand against her shoulder blade, the front and back ochos, the circles clockwise and counter, side-steps, crosses, and step-overs, the kisses he gave her, the stranger who commended him on finding such a young and supple partner, his smile when he said, she is my grand daughter.

Standing her for reasons she refuses to talk about, wanting to forget how much the world can hurt, she thinks of him, catches snowflakes on her sleeve, gardenias, some that join like couples who dance together frequently, pines wet with fresh snow. She walks across the field alternating slow, quick, and slow steps, holding her right palm up for a partner’s left.

Crossing her left over her right ankle, she pivots, brushing one leg against the other, stops to catch a snowflake on her tongue, steps through a point, begins a circle into every snowy afternoon she will need.

—Richard Roe, Middleton

Katsura Anyone who has ever kept a secret Knows that letters cannot be burned in a bundle Even after the fire eats through the string Or ribbon Or rubber band That binds them The letters huddle together like children So those at the core of the clutch Remain untouched As flames live and die around the margins The worlds of our words Especially those incompatible With this one Do not give themselves willingly To such an end The person who tends to the flames Must poke and prod Shuffle and sift In order to expose the soft white underbelly Of another’s reality Memories rising only to fall To ash In a burst of light We are born this way And we die this way The heaviness of our hearts Carried weightless upon the wind —Jason Splichal, Eau Claire

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It wasn’t long after Brian Roegge lost his job as a credit union manager that he and wife Sue began weighing the risks and rewards of opening an independent bookstore.

“We looked at bookstores for sale all over the Midwest, including one in Illinois near my parents,” says Brian. “The owners wanted too much money, so we got to thinking, Let’s start our own. We knew we wouldn’t get rich off of it, but we are both avid readers. Friends and family were often asking us for advice about what to read, so it made sense.”

The couple, who live in St. Paul, Minnesota, had spent time meandering the streets of Hudson, a historic town on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix River, and thought the location ideal. “We found that Hudson had a healthy business climate, a lot of visitors and no bookstore,” says Brian. “We both thought, Let’s do this.”

They settled on a storefront location on 2nd Street (essentially Hudson’s Main Street), right next to a music store and a popular restaurant. Opened in 2011, Chapter2Books was a hit with tourists and locals alike. One of their defining features was a large storefront window chock full of interesting displays, always drawing in passers-by. The store quickly became a gathering spot for a community of readers and best-selling to self-published authors, hosting readings by Ellen Hart, William Kent Krueger, Susan Toth and others. Events like story time and writer’s workshops helped the business survive, even thrive, during the colder months.

Things were going well. So it was a surprise when in February 2014 the Roegges received a notice that the building had new owners and was undergoing extensive renovations.

As such, Chapter2Books was to vacate its 2nd Street location.

Brian and Sue thought that their chapter as book store owners was coming to an end.

“We were seriously thinking [that] we just might have to close,” says Brian. “We couldn’t afford Main Street rents in this market.”

Sue took to the Internet, unsure of what she might accomplish. Using change.org, she started a campaign to garner signatures to petition the new owners for more time to move. “Almost four hundred people signed our petition,” she says. “While it didn’t persuade the new owners, we were very surprised and pleased that it generated a lot of awareness about our situation.”

Still, the shuttering of the store seemed inevitable. A final event in late February brought back visiting authors and customers from near and far to say farewell.

Just weeks before the store was officially homeless, Brian took a serendipitous detour from his usual route to work. He saw a new “For Rent” sign on the former Hudson Star Observer newspaper building at 226 Locust Street, just around the

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Photo credit: Brenda K. Bredahl

Local Bookshop Spotlight { Chapter2Books – Hudson }

Mystery writers Jessie Chandler, Ellen Hart, and Mary Beth Panichi (front row, left to right) with Chapter2Books owners Brian and Sue Roegge (back row) at a reading/signing event at the book store's new Locust Street location.

corner from the 2nd Street store. Although the Locust Street space was in the building’s lower level and not quite visible from 2nd Street, it was huge.

Brian and Sue began a new chapter for Chapter2Books. A new lease was signed, customers helped Brian and Sue ferry books the two blocks to the new location, and Christiansen Creative (a local design firm) began work to help develop marketing materials for the new Chapter2Books.

“It was an ideal time to reintroduce them to the community,” says Tricia Christensen, principal of Christiansen Creative. “One of the challenges is that the new space is on a lower level, so we wanted visuals that are punchy, visible, and affordable to produce. We also developed a number of taglines, and the store selected ‘Embrace Pulp Culture.’… We love it.”

Now that they had a new tagline, Sue again harnessed the power of the Internet to connect with fans of Chapter2Books.

Using the crowdfunding website Indiegogo.com, the store ended up raising about $4,000 for outdoor signage that draws more attention to the store’s below-street level entrance.

While the battle to keep Chapter2Books alive isn’t yet over, the new location seems to be working just fine. “We have been surprised that our events have been well attended,” says Brian.

“We’re not sure why. Maybe it is because parking isn’t as hard to find as it was on 2nd Street,” he adds with a chuckle.

The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis’ final book in the 1950s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, reveals how the story, “in which every chapter is better than the one before,” lives on.

Much like the fans of the Lewis series, readers in the Hudson area hope that the story of Chapter2Books will live on, too. For more information, visit chapter2books.com.

—Brenda K. Bredahl

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Inside the Creative Process: The Overture Center for the Arts

Remembering a Lost Bird: An Evening with Stanley A. Temple

Tuesday, September 23, 7–8:30 pm

Tuesday, October 7, 7–8:30 pm

Overture Center Playhouse, Madison

Greenfield Public Library, 5310 West Layton Ave.

Madison Opera’s Kathryn Smith and Jill Krynicki, Forward Theater’s Jennifer Uphoff Gray and Monica Butler, and the James Watrous Gallery’s Martha Glowacki and artist Chele Isaac share the method and madness behind Overture productions. Free and open to the public with advance registration.

Conservation biologist Stanley A. Temple shares the epic story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and its consequences for science and society today. Presented in collaboration with Greenfield Public Library and the UW–Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. Free and open to the public. No registration required.

Randall Berndt: The Taming of Nature Christine Style: Visual Stories and Genetic Explosions Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view November 11–December 23 Opening reception Friday, November 14, 5:30– 7:30 pm, with artists’ talks at 6:30 pm

Left: Randall Berndt, from the Homage to Famous Artists Series: Magritte’s Garden, 2014. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 18 in. Right: Christine Style, Benevolent Heart I, 2010–13. Woodcut with hand painting, 22 x 16 in.

Join us for side-by-side solo exhibitions from Randall Berndt and Christine Style. Berndt received an MFA in Painting from UW–Madison in 1969 and has pursued the life of the artist mixed with the demands of the “real world” ever since. Style received her MFA in Printmaking from UW–Milwuakee, and has been a professor teaching primarily printmaking, drawing, and graphics at UW–Green Bay for many years Her current work includes woodcuts, monotypes, and digital prints with encaustic. This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details