Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer 2016

wisc

people & ideas

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

Partners in Nature Roy & Charlotte Lukes chronicle the plants and animals of Door County

Shatterproof: The Stories of Jack Ritchie Meet Wisconsin’s master of short crime fiction

Shakespeare in Wisconsin $5.00 Vol. 62, No. 3

Summer 2016

How we’re celebrating four hundred years of the Bard

FRANK LLOYD W R I G H T ’S

VISIT. SHOP. DINE. TALIESINPRESERVATION.ORG SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN

CONTENTS

summer 2016 FEATURES 4 FROM THE DIRECTOR Sharpening our creative edge

6 UPFRONT 6 The Poetry Recitation Challenge brings out the poet in us all.

6 Winchester Academy provides lifelong learning for Central Wisconsinites.

7 WisContext takes a deep dive approach to Wisconsin news.

8 University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point goes 100% renewable.

10 PROFILE administrative offices/steenbock gallery 1922 university ave. | madison, WI 53726 tel. 608-263-1692 www.wisconsinacademy.org

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters produces programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. Our signature publication is Wisconsin People & Ideas, the quarterly magazine of Wisconsin thought and culture; programs include the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts, which showcases contemporary art from Wisconsin; Academy Talks, a series of public lectures and discussion forums; Wisconsin Initiatives, exploring major sustainability issues and solutions; and a Fellows Program, which recognizes accomplished individuals with a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. The Wisconsin Academy also supports the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and many other endeavors that elevate Wisconsin thought and culture.

Myles Dannhausen Jr. chronicles the life and times of a true nature boy, Roy Lukes.

16 ESSAY Elliott Puckette goes in search of Shakespeare in Wisconsin.

22 REPORT Our Shifting Currents report outlines nine ways we can better protect water quality and quantity, as well as Wisconsin's aquatic ecosystems.

28 ESSAY Richard Boudreau introduces us to Jack Ritchie, a prolific yet little known writer of short crime fiction.

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 1558-9633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Academy members receive this magazine free of charge.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/join for information on how to become a member of the Wisconsin Academy.

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Emmett Mottl, editorial assistant Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Charlotte & Roy Lukes, 2014 Photograph by Len Villano.

Photo credit: Torey Byrne/Door Shakespeare

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Copyright © 2016 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. All rights reserved. Postage is paid at Madison, Wisconsin. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address above.

Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare’s plays are still vital and essential. Here John Taylor Phillips and Marti Gobel are Oberon and Titania in the Door Shakespeare production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Joseph Hanreddy. Learn more on page 16.

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summer 2016 FEATURES 34 @ THE JAMES WATROUS GALLERY

Anne Pryor explores the powerful cultural and historic meanings behind Oneida raised beadwork.

44 FICTION

The first-place winner of our 2016 fiction contest: “Open House,” Our gallery, the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts, Madison.

by Allison Slavick

45 BOOK REVIEWS 45 Michael Kriesel reviews Earth As It Is in Heaven, by Karl Elder 47 Karla Huston reviews Violet Hours, by Jeanie Tomasko 49 Monette Bebow-Reinhard reviews The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay,

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder • Executive Director Rachel Bruya • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai • Project Coordinator Meredith Keller • Initiatives Director Don Meyer • Business Operations Manager Matt Rezin • Data & Office Systems Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Communications Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

by Kelly Harms

50 POETRY

50 Poems from the first-place winner of our 2016 poetry contest: Karen Loeb.

52 Poems from the second-place winner of our 2016 poetry contest: Janet Leahy.

54 Poems from the third-place winner of our 2016 poetry contest: Nancy Bauer-King.

Officers of the Board Linda Ware • President Tim Size • President-elect Millard Susman • Immediate-past President Diane Nienow • Treasurer James W. Perry • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Marianne Lubar • Vice President of Arts Cathy Cofell-Mutschler • Vice President of Letters

Photo credit: Anne Pryor

Statewide Board of Directors Leslie D. Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Patricia Brady, Madison Malcolm Brett, Oregon Frank D. Byrne, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan L. Jane Hamblen, Madison Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Kevin Reilly, Verona Bob Wagner, Mequon Marty Wood, Eau Claire

Beaders (l to r) Sandra Gauthier, Judith Jourdan, and Betty Willems at an Oneida Nation Arts Program workshop in 2013. Learn more about Oneida raised beadwork on page 34.

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Officers of the Academy Foundation Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Andrew Richards • Foundation President Jack Kussmaul • Foundation Vice President Diane Nienow • Foundation Treasurer David J. Ward • Foundation Secretary Foundation Directors Jane Elder Terry Haller Millard Susman Linda Ware

C ontents

NEWS for

MEMBERS Fundraising success for 2016 On June 30th the Wisconsin Academy completed our fiscal year on a high note: 290 friends from throughout Wisconsin and beyond helped us surpass our annual campaign for funds.

Through their generous financial contributions, this community of lifelong learners makes possible our programs and publications (like this magazine) that provide access to the creative and remarkable people and ideas of Wisconsin. Thank you!

Volunteers needed The Academy is always interested and open to engaging members in a variety of volunteer opportunities. If you are interested, please complete our new online form at wisconsinacademy.org/ brighterwi/volunteer or drop us a line at contact@wisconsinacademy.org.

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Monette Bebow-Reinhard is a published author and membership chair for the Wisconsin Archeological Society. She holds a Master's Degree in History from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, and works in Madison. Her website is grimmsetc.com Richard Boudreau is professor emeritus of English at UW–La Crosse, where he taught from 1968 to 1994, and an expert on Wisconsin literature. Boudreau presented a series of Wisconsin Public Radio programs on Wisconsin authors during the 1970s, and, with support from the Wisconsin Academy and the National Endowment for the Arts, toured the state in 1981 to discuss and share Wisconsin-authored books.

Boudreau is editor of The Literary Heritage of Wisconsin, Vols. I (1986) and II (1995).

Myles Dannhausen Jr is a native of Door County now living in Chicago. He is a contributing editor for the Peninsula Pulse newspaper and Door County Living, and has also written for Chicago Athlete, Exclusively Yours, Running Times, and GapersBlock.com.

He frequently returns to Door County to work in his parents’ garden and serve as course director of the Door County Half Marathon, Peninsula Century Ride, Spring Classic Ride, and to organize the Door County Beer Festival.

Karla Huston is the author of A Theory of Lipstick (Main Street Rag, 2013), as well as seven chapbooks of poetry. Huston’s writings have been published widely, including in The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of Small Presses (2012). She lives in Appleton.

Michael Kriesel’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Antioch Review, Rattle, North American Review, and The Progressive. He’s the winner of North American Review’s 2015 James Hearst Poetry Prize and past president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

Don’t miss out We have an exciting year of programs ahead. (Just check-out page 34 to learn more about the artists in our Oneida Raised Beadwork exhibition.) To make sure you get all the news from the Academy, keep your membership active.

If you are not yet a member, provide your e-mail at wisconsinacademy. org/contact to start learning about the Academy and the many ways we bring people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialogue on important issues.

Anne Pryor is a folklorist who specializes in the traditional cultures of Wisconsin. She holds degrees in Education and Cultural Anthropology. Pryor served as a folklorist on staff with the Wisconsin Arts Board from 1996 to 2016 where she coordinated the Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program and the Woodland Indian Arts Initiative.

She enjoys living close to the Yahara River with her husband Steve.

Fresh face This month the Academy is getting a long overdue fresh coat of paint on our Steenbock Center Offices (1922 University Ave, Madison). If you are in the neighborhood, stop by. It’s always nice when we can meet the members who help us serve the state.

Len Villano’s photography has been nationally published and featured, most recently in the travel book titled Door County Living in Pictures: The Photography of Len Villano. Dedicated to telling the story behind the person and the beauty within the landscape, Villano specializes in travel, portrait and lifestyle photography.

Elliott Puckette is a former editorial assistant for Wisconsin People & Ideas and current editor of The Clarion, the student newspaper of Madison College, where she studies theater and journalism. She has worked and volunteered for Young Shakespeare Players, Friends of the Madison Public Library, and the University of Wisconsin Press.

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FROM THE DIRECTOR

Sharpening our creative edge JANE ELDER WISCONSIN ACADEMY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR I grew up in Linden, a bedroom community just outside of Flint, Michigan. In our community, as in much of the state, we lived with the accepted conclusion that “What’s good for GM, is good for the country.” Yet as the auto industry changed over the decades due to internal and external forces, we watched the economic fabric of our community and state unravel. All of a sudden things weren’t so good for GM—or us—anymore.

So many conversations about our future, tinged with anxiety and nostalgia, included phrases like, When they open the plants again (which echoed similar phrases about the mines in the Upper Peninsula). It was hard for people to imagine life in Michigan without an economy driven by the “Big Three” automakers.

It seems that, as far back as the Fur Trade years of the 1600s, the economy of the upper Great Lakes region’s has been on a boom or bust cycle. Along with the permanent settlement of European immigrants came copper and lead mines, commercial fishing on the Great Lakes, clear-cut logging, and the rise of manufacturing. Booms, however, rarely stay booming forever.

In the Midwest, our lack of a post-manufacturing-boom strategy has left us with the unflattering “Rust Belt” label and, even worse, major economic upheaval for many communities. But there’s no reason to be shackled by what used to be. It’s much more exciting to imagine what can be. And people are beginning to imagine a new kind of economy for the Great Lakes Region that draws on our deep wealth of cultural, environmental, and intellectual assets—what many are calling a knowledge economy.

For instance, the 2006 Vital Center Report produced by the Brookings Institution observed that the Great Lakes Region is at a critical economic juncture: Will this once economic giant step forward to a future of economic and population growth, as a hub of research and innovation, a corporate R&D and decision center, a university-led global research hothouse, and a talent magnet and immigrant gateway; or, backward to a future of distressed cities, depopulated rural communities, out-migration, and closing plant doors—increasingly a backwater in the world economy?

The Vital Center report makes the case for embracing a knowledge economy that draws on the Progressive history of the Great Lakes Region, our abundant clean water—essential for drinking as well as for manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism—and deep cultural commitment to education.

The Great Lakes states and provinces have one of the world’s greatest clusters of public research universities, campuses that are continually generating new discoveries and technologies as well as a highly educated work force. A subsequent report urged regional leaders to work together and with the federal govern4

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ment to tap these educational assets “to produce the talent needed to compete in the 21st century, expand the public-private research and development infrastructure in the region to cultivate the technologies of the future [and] promote sustainable development within the ‘North Coast’.”

With its allusions to America’s coastal cultural and intellectual hubs, the North Coast moniker has a much better ring to it than Rust Belt. All of a sudden I wasn’t feeling so rusty any more.

Like many of us living in the North Coast, I was reminded that the vision for our future had been constrained within the bounds of manufacturing and mining for far too long.

The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, changed my thinking about how creativity itself is a potent force for positive change, including the economic diversity we can bring to the Great Lakes Region.

While it’s no secret that artists draw deeply from the creative well, people sometimes forget that creativity is an essential component of design, imagination, innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship—all elements that align well with the assets we can bring together to form our own knowledge economy.

Over the last decade the concepts of knowledge economies and creative economies have gained traction, and, in the Midwest, these are likely to be part of a diverse economic base that includes manufacturing, agriculture, health care, tourism, and more. By looking to Minnesota we can already see how investments in these two emerging sectors are adding diversity and resilience to their economic portfolio. Why not ours?

To explore how these strategies could work for Wisconsin, the Academy and several statewide partners, including the Wisconsin Arts Board, Arts Wisconsin, and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, are working to change the conversation about knowledge and creativity in Wisconsin. This fall we’ll launch the Wisconsin Creativity Initiative, which explores how specific investments in the knowledge economy and our creative sectors can make a brighter future for Wisconsin.

Through Academy Talks, this magazine, special gallery exhibitions, and other programs, we’ll find the elements of a creative economy that make the most sense for Wisconsin, and the ways we can harness these elements to make our communities and our state stronger. Our aim for the Wisconsin Creativity Initiative is to change the conversation about the power of creativity to improve Wisconsin’s economy, educational systems, and quality of life. We hope you will be part of this conversation.

Questions or comments? E-mail jelder@wisconsinacademy.org

Congratulations to the winners of the 2016 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contests Winners of the 2016 Wisconsin People & Ideas writing contests receive awards of $500 (first place), $250 (second place), and $100 (third place). The first-place author and poet also receive a one-week artist residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point, and all award-winners are invited to read their works at the 2016 Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison.

FICTION WINNERS 1st

2nd

3rd

POETRY WINNERS 1st

2nd

3rd

Allison Slavick

Richard Borovsky

Lange Allen

Karen Loeb

Janet Leahy

Nancy Bauer-King

Cable “Open House”

Madison “Lowlife”

Green Bay “Weathering the Storm”

Eau Claire “In the Science Museum”

New Berlin “Nighthawks”

Racine “Head Cheese”

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS

“Red Truck” – Judith Barisonzi, Rice Lake “Brother’s Pride” – Jeff Esterholm, Superior “Remedy of Fortune” – Ingrid Kallick, Madison “LeighLeigh’s Story” – Marilyn Shapiro Leys, Prairie du Chein “Mercy Mercy” – Olivia Sitter, Eau Claire “Woman in the Third Space” – Kathleen Stark, Madison

“Cancer is Not Cosmic Justice” – Cynthia Belmont, Ashland “Kindergarten Graduation” – Peter Burzynski, Milwaukee “Breakfast With Poets” – Janet Leahy, New Berlin “Alligators in the Basement” – Jeri McCormick, Madison “The Sighting” – Jeri McCormick, Madison “Her Statement” – Georgia Ressmeyer, Sheboygan “Kissing Marilyn Monroe” – Richard Roe, Middleton “Dead Porcupine: No Metaphor” – Steve Tomasko, Middleton “Working for Eugene” – Ann F. Wenzel, Madison “Altar boy, circa 1959” – Ed Werstein, Milwaukee

Join us for the Wisconsin Book Festival contest reading at A Room of One’s Own at 5:30 pm on Oct. 21!

Thanks to 2016 fiction contest judge BJ Hollars and poetry contest judge Kimberly Blaeser. The 2016 contests were coordinated by Wisconsin People & Ideas editor Jason A. Smith and the preliminary judges were Aaron Fai, John Lehman, and CX Dillhunt. All judging was done blindly and ranking was done solely on the merit of individual submissions in the opinion of our judges.

Thanks to our 2016 contest sponsors: WISCONSIN

BOOK

F E S T I VA L

NEW CONTESTS OPEN SOON! Fiction and poetry submissions accepted Sept. 1 – Dec. 1, 2016 for our next contest. Send in your best work to win cash, prizes, and more.

Details and online submission at wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

UPFRONT

Poetry by Heart

Poetry Recitation Challenge Project Inspires the Poet in All of Us What's your favorite poem? Can you recite it by heart?

To celebrate poetry and “heart,” Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser invites the memorization and recitation of poems for an online Poetry Recitation Challenge. Those who participate will have their video recitations made available on an interactive web page.

“Having poetry at our fingertips—or on our lips—as we go through our daily lives can enrich us in many ways,” says Blaeser. “Recitation was once a common art, one I’d like to help revive. When we know poems ‘by heart,’ they inhabit us and we them in a particular way. We internalize the images, the ideas, and the poem’s re-seeing of the world, we experience the felt rhythm of the language.

The poem becomes another part of the vocabulary with which we can encounter and process our experiences in the world.

It becomes a tool of celebration and of survival. Each poem we memorize adds to our intangible wealth,” she says.

Those who would like to participate in the project should select a published poem by a poet they love and learn it by

heart. They should then submit a good quality video of themselves reciting the poem from memory. Participants are asked to introduce themselves by name on the video recording as well as introduce the poem they perform with a sentence or two. This introduction of the poem should include the name of the poem and the poet. The performer might also note why the poem or poet is important to them, when they memorized the poem, or whatever else seems appropriate to a very brief introduction.

Send your video file submission to wipoetlaureate@gmail.com with the subject line “Submission Recitation Project” followed by the participant’s name (for example: Submission Recitation Project, Kimberly Blaeser). In the e-mail, include the name of the reciter, the title and author of the poem performed, and the location and date of the recitation. By submitting the video to this e-mail address, an individual is giving permission to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission to post their video and make it available for public viewing. (Participants under eighteen years of age must

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser

provide the e-mail address of a parent or guardian who can provide permission for posting of the video.)

If you want to make this more interesting, Blaeser suggests you challenge friends and public figures to recite a poem. Or you might plan a gathering with a group in a public place and hold a recitation event. Then submit the videos of

Winchester Academy Celebrates 25 Years of Learning in Waupaca For those in Central Wisconsin who crave more of the Wisconsin Academystyle public talks with leading Wisconsin thinkers, you have a valuable resource in the Waupaca-based Winchester Academy.

Neil Truman Eckstein, a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin— Oshkosh, had always dreamed of creating an adult education center in the rural hamlet of Winchester (about twenty minutes northwest of Oshkosh). Inspired by the Scandinavian folk academies of the 19th century, which offered free educational courses for citizens to learn and develop the critical tools necessary for participatory democracy, Eckstein and 6

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UW–Oshkosh colleague Glenn Johnson, Pastor Vern Holtan of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Appleton, and Graftonbased attorney Richard Kranitz established the Winchester Academy in 1973.

The purpose of the Winchester Academy was—and is today—to foster adult education by bringing together historians, poets, and other scholars to speak on a variety of topics outside the confines of traditional academic settings.

During those early years of the Academy, program attendees came primarily from the Fox Valley. As attendance grew, the Winchester Academy in 1991 began offering programs in Waupaca and ulti&

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mately moved its headquarters there in 1993 (they kept the name, though).

Today the Academy offers an annual schedule of twenty-five programs that range from presentations on myriad cultural and scholarly topics to musical performances and other special events.

Ann Buerger Linden, Winchester Academy’s executive director, says that the Academy takes no political position and seeks to provide only balanced and reliable information to the hundreds of participants who attend on a regular basis.

Her desire is that the Academy continue to “spark a deeper curiosity” in area attendees for another twenty-five years.

UPFRONT

Deep Dive News with

individual recitations from your “poetry by heart” celebration. Blaeser together with members of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission are also working to plan recitation events in the coming months, and she is willing to travel to events others plan.

Video submissions will be considered by an editorial committee. All acceptable submissions will be posted on an interactive map of Wisconsin and made available at wisconsinpoetleaureate.org. Submissions will continue to be reviewed on a rolling basis.

At the conclusion of April (Poetry Month) 2016, Blaeser reports the Commission had received several terrific submissions. Some were also collected as a part of the Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon and others from a special recitation event held at UW–Marathon County in Wausau. Since then, more submissions have been flowing in.

Add your voice to the mix, and help make Wisconsin the Poetry Recitation Capital of the U.S. —William Stobb

During the last fifty years Waupaca’s population has grown from approximately 4,000 to nearly 6,000; industries have grown and the educational system (including Fox Valley Technical College’s satellite campus) is among the best in the state. Winchester Academy is no small part of this progress, providing opportunities for everyone to expand their learning experiences—from Art to Zoology—and better understand our rapidly changing world.

For more information and a list of free Winchester Academy programs, visit winchesteracademywaupaca.org.

—Jason A. Smith

Often times, the news reported by major media outlets focuses on a crisis or calamity years or even decades in the making. Take for instance the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan. If citizens understood the history behind the decision to draw water from the Flint River or were better informed about the changes (or lack thereof) in infrastructure that caused the lead contamination, could the crisis have been averted?

A new, collaborative journalism project in Wisconsin called WisContext is looking to fill that information gap through accessible and informative guides, news reports, and explanatory resources that directly address the issues of today that may become the crises of tomorrow.

In the case of Wisconsin water quality issues (of which there are many), the WisContext website features information ranging from data on arsenic and nitrate pollution to updates on the Department of Natural Resources lead pipe fund and expert perspective on water quality and quantity in Wisconsin.

Water quality reporting is just one of many topics covered by WisContext, which was developed in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Wisconsin Public Radio, and Wisconsin Public Television. Launched in June 2016, WisContext.org features a variety of articles and videos that are designed to help readers understand the local impact of statewide and national news items, breaking them down and explaining what they mean for a city or county.

Kristian Knutsen, the managing editor of WisContext, describes the focus of the project as a, “deep dive, explanatory approach to reporting on the issues that matter,” which gives news time to develop and connect to broader, statewide topics.

In addition to diving deeper into news items from WPR and WPT, WisContext offers a series of informative guides designed to help readers take action. One such guide explains drinking water standards and tests that should be conducted to ensure well water meets state standards for bacteria, nitrates, and other elements, equipping readers with knowledge and information necessary to understand if their families are at risk.

The WisContext project is part of a renewed effort by all partners to better use the skills and knowledge of Wisconsin-based experts in various fields to improve the resources and information available to state residents.

One of the unique aspects of the site is Fieldwork, a section that shares research and findings from local experts to supplement existing reporting on current news.

Scott Gordon, WisContext associate editor, sees the new site as an opportunity to digitally connect the expertise and resources of UW–Extension with a broader audience that may not be reached by traditional public radio and television reporting. Too, WisContext encourages other news outlets to reprint any content with attribution to facilitate greater public access.

WisContext is an excellent way to stay up-to-date on state and local issues while exploring the personal impact of these issues at greater depth.

Gordon is hopeful that “WisContext will help people appreciate the issues that we are all grappling with in our communities around the state.”

And, perhaps, a little more appreciation and understanding will make all of us better neighbors.

—Emmett Mottl

UPFRONT

The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point has achieved a new milestone in sustainability: It is the first university in the state to have 100% of its electricity come from renewable sources.

About thirty colleges and universities in the country are at this point, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership.

UW–Stevens Point attained the 100% renewable mark through energy conservation, reduced consumption, and the purchase of renewable energy credits through Renewable Choice Energy. These credits represent the environmental benefits associated with generating electricity from renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal and biogas.

“By purchasing renewable energy credits, we are taking responsibility for the environmental impact of our electricity use and promoting the development of clean energy sources,” says Shelly Janowski, sustainability program and policy analyst at UW–Stevens Point.

Electricity costs at UW–Stevens Point for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016, are projected to be about $2 million. The university will pay about $136,400 for the environmental attributes of green electricity.

Numerous energy conservation measures are underway in academic and administrative buildings on campus, part of an overall plan to reduce energy use and minimize energy costs.

The resulting energy savings will pay for system and equipment upgrades, including lighting, mechanical, steam trap, and building envelope improvements. The State of Wisconsin and UW System collaborated on several energy conservation projects for state facilities.

These energy conservation measures on campus will result in an anticipated annual energy cost savings of $607,000. Nearly two-thirds of the estimated savings—$397,600—will be in reduced electricity consumption. The balance is from reduced water use and steam production.

UW–Stevens Point’s total energy consumption includes purchased electricity plus on-campus sources consumed at the heating plant, which provides steam to university buildings.

Natural gas is the primary fuel source, but coal, oil, and wood pellets are used as backup fuels and to maintain equipment.

Solar panels used to preheat domestic hot water in the residence halls reduce the need for steam generation.

Many students are interested in sustainability and reducing their footprint on the Earth’s resources, notes Dave Barbier, UW–Stevens Point sustainability coordinator. “Having 100% of electricity from renewable sources is a sustainability benchmark that sets UW–Stevens Point apart from other campuses,” says Barbier.

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Photo credit: UW–Stevens Point

UWSP GOES 100% RENEWABLE

Energy conservation and efficiency reduce both energy demand and wasted energy. Practical actions include weatherizing and retrofitting residential and commercial buildings, installing advanced technologies such as LED lighting, using super-efficient design for new buildings, increasing efficiencies in manufacturing processes, and waste reduction. Energy conservation measures under way at UW–Stevens Point include upgrading lights to energy efficient LED lights. Here (l to r), Andy Klessig, Jose Rodriguez and Patrick Houlihan of Faith Technologies replace lighting in a Science Building lecture hall.

According to Barbier, the university’s ultimate goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. UW–Stevens Point has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to a net of zero by then, attaining 25% of the goal each decade. Achieving 100% renewable electricity helps the university surpass the first target date of 2020 and be well on its way to achieving the goals set for 2030.

Managing energy use through improved efficiency and reduced consumption are keys to meeting these goals.

Purchasing renewable energy credits, managing forests at several UW–Stevens Point locations, and composting are considered carbon offsets that help reduce the total emissions from campus operations.

“The long-term goal is to reduce our emissions through conservation, efficiency, and using renewable energy sources that do not produce carbon emissions, so we don’t have to rely as much on carbon offsets. For the time being, offsets help meet the carbon reduction goals,” says Barbier.

Reprinted courtesy of UW–Stevens Point

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PROFILE

Nature Boy The Life and Times of Roy Lukes

BY MYLES DANNHAUSEN JR.

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s we age, we often envy the excitement of the little boy who discovers a chipmunk burrow or the girl enraptured by a family of ducks on a pond. Sometimes, we wish we could go back in time and again experience that special joy of discovery.

For Door County naturalist and writer Roy Lukes, this childhood sense of wonder has never diminished. At age 86, Roy remains a “nature boy” in all the best ways, still enamored with every plant, tree, and bird and as curious about their habits today as he was as a child growing up in Kewaunee. There his parents instilled in him a love of nature. His father was a wonderful gardener and mushroom hunter; his mother, a lover of wildflowers. She would take him down to the river or into the woods to explore, listen to the birds, and admire the power of trees.

The thrill of those early forays into nature has stayed with Roy for his sixty years of service as naturalist for the Ridges Sanctuary in Door County. The 1,600 acres of the Ridges Sanctuary is rich in rare and endangered plant species, including dwarf iris

and some 25 native species of orchids, as well as the remnants of the boreal forest that once covered this part of Wisconsin.

The high biological value of the Ridges was recognized in the 1930s by Albert Fuller, Curator of Botany at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Fuller and a group of Door residents who shared his concerns established a private land trust in 1937 to protect the Ridges from being developed. One of the co-founders and board members of the Ridges was Emma Toft, a fierce preservationist whose family owned an equally unique property—Toft Point—on the east side of the bay. Toft became a great influence in Roy’s life, instilling in him an unflinching dedication to the natural wonders of Door County.

When Roy was hired by the Ridges board in 1964, Toft knew the organization was lucky to get a naturalist and manager of

Left: Roy Lukes in his element at the Ridges Sanctuary in Baileys Harbor, Door County. Photographs taken by Lukes and published in his regular Peninsula Pulse nature column bring the plants and animals of Door County to life.

A version of this essay first appeared in the May 6, 2016, edition of Peninsula Pulse. Center photo of Roy Lukes by Len Villano reprinted courtesy of the Ridges Sanctuary; nature photos are reprinted by permission of Charlotte Lukes.

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Photo by Len Villano. Reprinted courtesy of Ridges Sanctuary.

Photo by Len Villano. Reprinted courtesy of Ridges Sanctuary.

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Left: Once home to budding naturalist Roy Lukes, the Upper Range Light is one of a series of six lights built in 1869 to keep ships off the treacherous reefs and shallows at the entrance to Baileys Harbor. Today its primary function is as an office for the staff of the Ridges Sanctuary.

Right: Even after decades of walking the paths of the Ridges Sanctuary, Roy and Charlotte Lukes find new things to discover.

his caliber. Roy had earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, served in the Korean War, then earned his Master’s Degree at the University of Wisconsin– Madison before studying to become a teacher at the Door Kewaunee Teacher College in Algoma, not far from his boyhood home.

In 1964, the Ridges Sanctuary was nothing like the educational hub and community cornerstone that it is today. There was no state of the art nature center building and there were only a few of the trademark boardwalks and bridges that help visitors navigate the swales and wooded dunes. Back then, the lighthouses that are today symbolic of the sanctuary were in disrepair. But Roy saw only potential. He immediately set himself to the job of transforming the Ridges into much more than a preserve.

Recognizing Roy’s gift for teaching and his dedication to nature and to the Ridges, Toft arranged for him to live at the Upper Range Light on the grounds of the sanctuary, a sparse abode that the U.S. Coast Guard had abandoned. It was easy to see why they left: The doors barely closed, there was no insulation, and heat came only by way of three cast iron stoves. Roy spent his first night sleeping on three sofa cushions spread on the floor, and would later write in one of his earliest articles on Door County nature that he feared the wind would blow the light tower clean off the house.

During his early years at the Ridges Roy built bridges, cleared trails, and forged invaluable relationships with guests, donors, 12

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and schoolteachers. He also documented area plants and animals in astounding detail and led twice-daily tours that over the years introduced thousands of people to the wonders hiding amongst the swales. Roy was instrumental not only in the growth of the Ridges, which is now a National Natural Landmark, but also in the conservation of thousands of acres throughout the Door County Peninsula.

Indeed, today the Lukes name is almost synonymous with the Ridges Sanctuary. But not just because of Roy. His wife Charlotte has been a steadfast supporter of the Ridges since the two met in 1971. A mycologist, conservationist, and frequent contributor to Roy’s regular nature columns in Door County newspapers, Charlotte is an established authority on Door County nature in her own right (she has identified 596 mushroom species in Door County alone). Together over the years the two have received nearly thirty awards for their dedication to conservation and the Door County community.

Roy knew he found his “partner in nature” when Charlotte visited Baileys Harbor from her home in Milwaukee, joining a friend on a hike at the Ridges. Charlotte hadn’t brought hiking clothes with her, so she had to borrow some ill-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt from her friend’s husband. That was the day she met Roy, clad in his old Army shirt, threads dangling from its cuffs,

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his hat stained, his work jeans full of holes. Charlotte saw him again at a presentation he gave soon after. She was awed by his photographs, and, when Charlotte returned to Milwaukee, they began exchanging letters. Letters soon became visits.

For Christmas Roy gave her a bird book, binoculars, and a special hat for hiking. He didn’t give her a ring, but he invited her up to Baileys Harbor for New Years Eve. Charlotte made dinner for Roy and some friends and Roy invited her to breakfast at the Upper Range Light the next morning.

“Wouldn’t it be great if you lived up here all year?” Roy asked.

“Where, at the Nelson Motel?” she said, referring to the only hotel in Baileys Harbor open during the winter months.

“No, here at the Range Light.” he said.

“Yeah, but wouldn’t the neighbors talk?” Charlotte smartly replied.

And that’s when Roy asked her to marry him. She said yes, and they went snowshoeing out to Toft Point, Roy’s favorite place.

Roy had learned from Emma Toft the art of luring birds to his hand with food, and on this day he created one of Charlotte’s favorite memories of their early courtship.

“Roy had this red woolen hat on,” Charlotte recalls. “He told me to take my gloves off, and then he put birdseed in my hand [and his], and he began to whistle. And this bird, a black-capped chickadee, comes and lands on his hat, crawls down his arm, and eats the bird seed out of his hand.”

That day Roy secured himself not just a wife, but also a fellow lover of nature and an editor for life. Charlotte became central to Roy’s writing process, often suggesting subjects and helping him to clarify his thoughts and get them down on paper.

Many Door Country residents and visitors alike can trace their appreciation for the area’s plants, animals, and geology to Roy and Charlotte, who are known as the “go-to” people when it comes to questions about the plants and animals of Door County.

Roy began his writing career in 1968 by sharing his Ridges adventures and observations in print, inviting readers into his experiences with an unsurpassed knowledge and unrivaled joy for the subject matter. Over time, Roy became the voice of the natural world in Door County.

His articles delved into the science behind the habits of particular birds, the delicacy of the Large Yellow Lady’s Slipper flower, what contributes to the growth of trees, why spiders are our friends. But what enthralled many devoted readers of Roy’s regular column was a wide-eyed, boyish awe of the natural world that he has never relinquished.

“Usually he would share some information about an animal's behavior or habitat, but also a story about an encounter that he had with that animal in the past,” says longtime reader Laura McNefee of Little Sturgeon. “I think his observations, as well as the photographs, enabled those of us who are not naturalists to be more receptive and perceptive to the natural things around us.”

After giving readers a lesson on the remarkable ways the black-capped chickadee adapts to sub-zero temperatures (by accelerating to more than 1,000 heartbeats per minute), Roy

would end his column with a personal experience that took readers back to their own childhood experiences.

I was quite impressed the first time I removed a chickadee from a mist net. Ed Peartree, licensed bander of Oconomowoc, was teaching me the art of mist netting. After a couple of weekends of watching him, he finally allowed me to remove my first bird, a chickadee. What a scrapper! What an initiation I received: Its body seemed to hum or vibrate in my hand—little did I realize then what its normal heartbeat was.

Joe Knaapen, a news reporter at the Door County Advocate for much of Roy’s time as columnist, calls him a rare treasure for a small community. “The things he and his like brought to the community as an environmental resource and in fostering an appreciation for the environment are highly unusual,” says Knappen, pointing out that “not every place has people of that caliber.”

In 2007 Roy took his columns to the Peninsula Pulse, where co-owner Madeline Harrison was proud to welcome his voice.

“What I came to notice over years of reading his words, week in and week out, is what a tenderness he has toward nature,” Harrison says. “It isn't all science and biology. There's something very touching about the way he regards plants and birds and animals—there’s a true kindness there.”

Before the Internet, many readers clipped his columns to save as references, piling them up in desk drawers, file cabinets, and on desktops. One of those readers was a budding photographer named Len Villano, now the acclaimed nature photographer of the Peninsula Pulse and Door County Living.

“He was writing about what was right here, not some animals far off in Africa,” Villano says. “I had a file drawer full of his columns that I’d clip and save to learn more about what I was photographing.”

Steve Leonard, who has been executive director of the Ridges Sanctuary since 2006, credits Roy with turning the Ridges into a renowned educational facility. Leonard points out how Roy used his regular nature columns to cultivate a budding awareness of the Ridges as a destination for appreciating and understanding nature and increase the numbers of people from Door County and beyond who clamored to join Roy on his hikes.

Perhaps what Roy loved most about writing was when his readers contacted him with nature questions—“What is this bird? What is this sound?”—or better yet, when they alerted him to the discovery of a massive tree or an unfamiliar bird on their property.

Nick Anderson, a local nature enthusiast and friend of Roy’s, once called to tell him that a beautiful Northern Hawk Owl had just landed in his yard. “I’ll be right over,” Roy told Anderson.

“He was excited, and he and Charlotte raced over to our house and took pictures. He loved it, really loved getting those calls from people.”

For most writers, the exclamation point is to be avoided. But in Roy’s columns they fit. If you met Roy for even a few moments, you realized that he didn’t use them to embellish, but only to come close to portraying the excitement and wonder he found in nature: W I S C O N S I N

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Photo by Len Villano. Reprinted courtesy of Ridges Sanctuary.

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A series of forested dunes and narrow wetlands called swales parallel the sweeping northern arc of Baileys Harbor. The dunes, the ridges for which the nature sanctuary is named, mark the ancient shorelines of a gradually receding Lake Michigan. Here a sandhill crane has built a nest in a marshy swale.

Do you have problems in summer with spiders, slugs, cutworms, armyworms, or tent caterpillars in your garden? If you do, get some toads. It is estimated that in a four-month period one large hungry toad will consume up to 10,000 of these injurious insects!

That excitement has never waned, says Bob Howe, Professor and Director of the Cofrin Center for Biodiversity at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. “For as much as he has witnessed, he always gets excited,” Howe says. “He’s all ears, thirsty to learn more, discussing ideas and observations you brought to him.

You always felt like you were a really close friend, and I’m sure a lot of people would say the same. It’s pretty rare to have that effect on people.”

While his articles have reached tens of thousands of people, there are hundreds of emerging and established naturalists alike who Roy has directly influenced by sharing his knowledge and respect for the natural world.

Thomas Erdman, curator of Green Bay’s Richter Museum of Natural History, met Roy as a teenager in the 1960s when he accompanied him on a trip to band birds in Mill Center. “There 14

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were hundreds and hundreds of evening grosbeaks,” says Erdman. “I was there to take photos of the birds with my old box camera, and he showed me how to band birds. That day started a lifelong friendship.”

Erdman began driving the hour north to Door County on weekends to band birds with Roy. “I don’t think he tried to be a father figure, but he became one as he showed me how to be, how to act, how to learn,” says Erdman, whose father died when he was thirteen. “He had a tremendous influence on me. I owe a lot of what I’ve done and the things I value to Roy.” Erdman has gone on to band more than 45,000 birds in Wisconsin. He became president of the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, and his research linking dioxins to deformities in birds was crucial in starting the massive cleanup of the Fox River and Green Bay. But Erdman started down that path thanks to a day with Roy Lukes, joining hundreds of environmental stewards who trace the origins of their passion to an article by Roy or hike with him through the Ridges.

Stories such as Erdman’s come as no surprise to those of us in Door County who have long marveled at Roy’s lifelong ability to connect with children. It’s a skill that wasn’t honed in teaching school, but that comes naturally to him, most likely because he remains young at heart.

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“He thought it was so important to reach children,” Charlotte says. “He’d say that if you grow up not knowing [about nature], not caring, then how can you preserve it?”

Norb Blei, the renowned chronicler of the characters and caretakers of Door County, wrote of Roy’s connection with children in his most famous book, Door Way: The People in the Landscape (1981): What I recall more than anything that morning was the constant consideration he afforded my seven-year-old son, always giving him first crack at the telescope or his own pair of binoculars.

“After all,” he told us, a group of about ten adults and one child, all strangers, “this little guy is the most important member of the group. He’s the fella we’re going to have to depend on someday.”

Roy’s dedication to putting children in touch with nature can be traced back to an otherwise normal day in which he was driving to class at the Door Kewaunee Teacher College in Kewaunee. Roy, not more than 22 or 23 years old, observed a huge flock of birds cross right in front of his car. He went home obsessed with identifying them. He recalls an idea forming in his mind: “If I was going to teach children, I had better learn about birds and plants and animals and everything else of interest in the out-of-doors.”

Roy taught for several years at Gibraltar School while he worked weekends and summers at the Ridges. When the school decided they didn’t need him as a full time teacher anymore in 1970, he became an environmental education specialist, visiting the small rural schools throughout Door County at regular intervals. Teachers marveled at the way Roy could hold a class full of second-graders in the palm of his hand.

“He would get them so quiet that a whole class could sneak up on a bird at a bird feeder,” says Mike Madden, who taught at Sevastopol School in unincorporated Institute (near Sturgeon Bay) for 35 years. Madden credits Roy as one of the reasons he became a teacher. “I think it was his integrity and sincerity, and something special about his deep, masculine voice and the way he delivered his words. If a child came up to him and showed him a small rock, [the child] would walk away thinking it was the most special rock in the world.”

When he wasn’t wooing them with his quiet sincerity, Roy was mesmerizing kids with exuberance over a new discovery. “He could get so excited working with children, I’ve seen him jump up and down and yell ‘Whoopee!’,” Madden says.

Over the years Roy and Charlotte have been honored with lifetime achievement awards by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology and Gathering Waters Conservancy, and Roy has received accolades for his work as a naturalist from more than a dozen other organizations.

Even as he battled metastatic cancer, Roy continued to write his regular newspaper column. As his energy waned last year, sapped by repeated chemotherapy treatments, Charlotte suggested to Roy that it might be time to stop writing his column.

But Roy wouldn’t hear of it. His article count had climbed past

3,000, and, as long as he and Charlotte could write it together, he wanted to keep sharing observations culled from decades of detailed daily journals, chronicling the ups and downs of the flora and fauna of the peninsula as few others have chronicled any place on earth.

Filled with observations and data that Roy and Charlotte kept on note cards for most of their lives, these columns reflect a more or less continuous history of Door County’s natural world in astounding detail that includes the temperature, wildlife seen and counted, rainfall, and spring bird arrivals.

Michael Strigel, director of the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona, calls these recordings “almost incomprehensible” in their value. It’s fitting that one of Roy’s own heroes is Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin’s best-known environmentalist and the author of A Sand County Almanac, which Roy considers required reading for budding naturalists.

“When I think of Roy, the word pioneer comes to mind,” says Strigel. “Climate scientists today study Aldo Leopold’s observations, and, in the years to come, they will study Roy’s. His work will have incredible value for generations.”

It was future generations Roy and Charlotte had in mind when they cultivated the Friends of Toft Point, a 250-member group of volunteers who support the management plan of what is today a State Natural Area and National Natural Landmark. Howe calls Roy “the conscience of Toft Point,” the 743-acre preserve once owned by the Toft Family.

“He talks longingly of the times that he could go into the woods and wishing he could get back on his feet and go measure some big trees,” says Nick Anderson, who is also director of the Friends of Toft Point. “This last year, he couldn’t drive anymore.

I called him up and said, ‘I’m heading to Toft Point, you better come along.’ He’s so close to that place. Every time he’s out there he’s transformed back to those early days of his life and helping Emma. It’s so important to him. He’d have a camera along, capturing every moment, just revitalized, and he’d take a deep breath being in the presence of what he worked so hard to preserve. It was magical being out there with him.”

Not long ago Steve Jorns, a former student of Roy’s who now lives just a couple miles down the road from the Lukes, called Roy’s wife Charlotte to check on the health of his favorite teacher.

“He told me that Roy once took the class out into the woods,” Charlotte says. “Roy stopped and quieted the class before whistling a bird song, and out of the trees a bird came down and sat on Roy’s shoulder.”

“Was it a chickadee?” Charlotte asked Jorns, knowing it was. Z Editor’s Note: Roy Lukes died peacefully on June 26, 2016, with wife Charlotte at his side. Memorial services will be held on August 7 at the Door County Auditorium in Fish Creek. Memorials gifts can be made to the Door County Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy, Birch Creek Music Performance Center, Peninsula Music Festival, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County, or to the nature organization of your choice.

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Shakespeare in Wisconsin

BY ELLIOTT PUCKETTE

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n April 23 at 7:00 am a small group of people met at the top of a hill in rural southwest Wisconsin. For the next 24 hours, they took turns speaking the words of one of the most prolific and influential writers in

human history.

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.

Lines from William Shakepeare’s As You Like It and dozens of other plays and sonnets rang out across the hillside during the Vigil in the Woods at American Players Theatre. Paying tribute to playwright and poet William Shakespeare, members of school and community theaters, professional and amateur actors, and lovers of great literature took to the open-air stage to share their passion for what many consider to be the greatest collection of words in the English language. Experience wasn’t necessary to participate, and polished performance wasn’t the point. In the hearts and on the tongues of those present at the Vigil in the Woods that day, Shakespeare’s words were enough.

Four hundred years after his death at age 52, people all over the world are honoring the Bard through performance and discussion of his work. As a testament to the lasting power of his wit, wisdom, and wordcraft, Shakespeare is today performed in every language, under every condition, from prestigious performance halls to refugee camps, across the world.

In the opening decades of the 1600s you could see a Shakespeare play only at the open-air Globe Theatre in London, England. Located just south of the River Thames, the Globe was home to the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company of actors, and was the practicing ground for honing his craft.

Shakespeare and his fellow actors—all men at the time—performed for audiences of all classes and backgrounds, with groundlings paying a penny to stand for hours (and risk being pickpocketed) and wealthier attendees observing from terraced seating above. These performances competed with bear baitings and public executions as the most popular forms of entertainment for the poor and working classes.

Why is it that, with so many archaic words and obscure references, Shakespeare’s plays are still being performed today? This question is being dissected and discussed by people across Wisconsin committed to the community and creativity brought to us by one of the brightest writers in the history of the English language.

American Players Theatre The second-largest outdoor theater in the U.S., American Players Theatre near Spring Green hosts

Left: Photos from Door Shakespeare and American Players Theatre productions of (clockwise from upper left) Julius Caesar, A Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and A Comedy of Errors.

American Players Theatre photos by Liz Lauren. Door Shakespeare photos by Torey Byrne. Reprinted by permission.

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Photo credit: Liz Lauren

Photo credit: American Players Theatre

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Brenda DeVita has been with American Players Theatre for over twenty years.

Actors (l to r) Casey Hoekstra, Melisa Pereyra, Cristina Panfilio and Laura Rook shine in the 2016 American Players Theatre production of The Comedy of Errors.

over 100,000 people during the June through October season, which includes productions of at least two Shakespeare plays and five other plays by classic and contemporary playwrights.

For their commitment to the production of classic theater, American Players Theatre was recently called “the finest classical repertory company in the U.S.”

by Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout. This commitment reflects both the deft production of classic works and, since the company’s founding in 1980, a continual exploration of what constitutes a classic. With a mission of “bringing the classics to the people,” American Players Theatre in Spring Green tries to answer the question of Shakespeare’s enduring legacy every day.

Artistic director Brenda DeVita, who has been with the company for more than twenty years, says that “artistry of language and exploration of universal themes” are two broad requirements for a classic. According to DeVita, American Players Theatre also seeks to promote inclusion and diversity in its productions, two elements often unexplored in the traditional theatre canon. This year, classic works by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard will play on the main stage, while provocative works by contemporary playwrights Carlyle Brown, Stephen Massicotte, and Sarah Ruhl play in the smaller Touchstone Theatre.

Located down a wooded road in the rolling hills of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region near the Wisconsin River, Amer-

ican Players is hours away from major cities. Even the Up-The-Hill main stage is a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot and picnic area along a winding path that takes theater-goers through a small portion of the 110-acre property lovingly maintained by staff and volunteers.

The American Players team thinks the rural Wisconsin environment is central to what they do: “Play in the Woods.” Company member David Daniel compares the uphill hike to theatergoing in classical Greece and Rome, where theaters were removed from the city, usually on a hillside, and all audience members had to walk together on a shared path. Daniel says this shared experience helps to strip away the divisions of the real world and brings people together as a community before they even see the play.

The Shakespeare plays the company is producing this season, King Lear and The Comedy of Errors, embody two opposite yet complementary sides of the Bard. King Lear, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest work, encapsulates timeless human themes—greed, cruelty, betrayal, loyalty, family, aging, death, folly, and madness— in a devastating and beautiful tragedy:

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Death, traitor! nothing could have subdued nature To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.

Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?

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Much more accessible, The Comedy of Errors captures a different side of Shakespeare. What seems to be a familiar farce based on mistaken identity—two sets of identical twins separated at birth inadvertently switch places and shenanigans ensue—is actually a droll musing on the complexity of daily life.

For this summer’s production, director David Frank (former American Players artistic director and current Wisconsin Academy Fellow) is tweaking things a bit by casting one set of twins as female in the hopes of adding to the mayhem.

The bawdy broadness of Comedy is a fine reminder of how Shakespeare’s work can please a diverse audience on multiple levels.

DeVita bristles at the notion that Shakespeare is only for the “elite” or that his language or themes are somehow inaccessible. “I’m a farm girl from Iowa, and [I thought] Shakespeare was not for me.

It became clear to me that it was about me—and it’s about you,” she says, adding, “It just took a really good actor to make me understand that.”

Young Shakespeare Players Young Shakespeare Players was founded in Madison in 1980 with a simple idea: anyone of any age can connect with Shakespeare. For 36 years under the direction of Richard and Anne DiPrima, Young Shakespeare Players has been producing uncut Shakespeare plays with actors ranging in age from 7 to 18.

Photo credit: Anne DiPrima

Photo credit: Will Sadler

Photo credit: Will Sadler

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Young Shakespear Players cast members Vimala (Titania) and Caitlyn (Mustard Seed) in full dress for a recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Richard DiPrima has written multiple books on the language of Shakespeare.

Instilled with an early love of Shakespeare’s words by his mother, Richard DiPrima has been exploring and sharing the Bard’s plays through individual scholarship and community-level performance his entire life. He firmly believes that traditional educational systems don’t challenge children in a meaningful way.

Pointing out that uncut Shakespeare is something even professional adult companies rarely attempt to produce, DiPrima says that “it’s impossible for [children] to do it. So when they do do it—and they can and they do—it teaches them so much more about themselves. There’s no problem in the world that they feel is above them if it’s worthwhile tackling.

And everyone knows it. No one’s going to say ‘Oh, that’s just Shakespeare, that’s kiddie work.’ “ With a regular repertoire of twenty Shakespeare plays ranging from the familiar A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the obscure Cymbeline, as well as two stage adaptations of Charles Dickens novels and a dozen or so one-act plays by George Bernard Shaw, the Young Shakespeare Players stage is bustling all year round. Each production features multiple casts, allowing every actor the opportunity to perform a significant amount.

Equal opportunity to experience Shakespeare is one of the key values at Young Shakespeare Players; auditions are not to determine who will perform and who will not, but to decide which role or combination of roles to which each actor is best suited.

three or four years. The novice-toinstructor transition that many actors make after working with the Young Shakespeare Players reflects a mentorship cycle that plays out across many of the performing arts. This relationship is beneficial not just for those learning but for those teaching, giving people in their teens and twenties the space to consider their own knowledge and share it in a meaningful way. And at Young Shakespeare Players, these mentors are passing down a love of language and a shared human experience.

Actors are expected to memorize their lines and also understand the meaning behind the words. Despite the density of Shakespearean text, filled with puns and archaic references and words, there is some quintessentially human element that runs through these plays: his grasp of humor, pathos, double entendre, allusion, and metaphor all reflect a deep understanding of human character. This is what the actors feel when performing on stage.

If they are successful, the audience feels it, too. “[People ask], How could one person think of all that when writing it? and our answer has always been the same. If Shakespeare thought of it all consciously before he wrote these words, he was a great genius. If he wrote them and did not think of them all in advance, he was a greater genius still,” says DiPrima, who has written multiple books on the language of Shakespeare.

While DiPrima continues to guide the vision and artistic tone for Young Shakespeare Players, former actors produce and direct the shows. Michael Fleischman and Katherine Johnson, two of the directors this summer, began acting in the company when they were eight and nine years old. In their early twenties now, Fleischman and Johnson are sharing what they’ve learned over the last decade—about Shakespeare, acting, humanity—with the next generation of Young Shakespeare Players.

When it comes to working with young people, “generations” are very short, W I S C O N S I N

Door Shakespeare As the sun sets on the Garden in Björklunden, a curtain rises to reveal a reclining Theseus: Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

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Photo credit: Torey Byrne

Photo credit: Braden Moran

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Door Shakespeare’s Ludwigsen has performed in theaters across the U.S. and U.K.

For the 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Door Shakespeare director Joseph Hanreddy cast Bottom and the Mechanicals as Midwestern, blue-collar workers.

So begins Door Shakespeare’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While Door Shakespeare produces only two plays during their summer season (this year the other is Julius Ceasar), they do them every night on an outdoor stage at the 405-acre Björklunden estate just south of Baileys Harbor on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Door Shakespeare started as a project of American Folklore Theater (now Northern Sky Theater) in 1995. Realizing a potential to reach many more people with the Bard’s plays, the American Folklore Theater board decided to make the project an independent entity in 1999. Although there was already a colorful diversity in the Door County theater scene at the time, “there was this really great niche and place for classical theater,” notes Door Shakespeare executive producer Amy Ludwigsen.

Too, the company felt they had the perfect space to produce Shakespeare’s works in a pastoral environment.

Ludwigsen, who studied theater at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, says that the location of the performances is a vital part of the company’s vision. “Shakespeare is incredible to experience outdoors, in a smaller, intimate space.”

For Door Shakespeare’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, guest director

Joseph Hanreddy wants “to make it feel like that play takes place here [in Door County], that the people you see in this play are the people you would see in this community.”

A former artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater (1993–2010) and veteran actor, Hanreddy emphasizes the humanity of Bottom and the Mechanicals, craftsmen who remind him of the blue-collar workers of Door County and Wisconsin. In Hanreddy’s empathetic treatment, the Mechanicals become respectable and recognizable, something more than just slapstick comic relief.

Ludwigsen and her fellow company members are committed to “opening people’s perceptions to what Shakespeare’s theater originally was—the atmosphere, the environment—and how that relates and is still relevant to us today.” Door Shakespeare works especially hard to connect with kids, providing free tickets to them during the summer and working with area teachers to ensure plays are discussed in classes during the fall.

“Shakespeare’s meant to be heard,” Ludwigsen says, “it can be kind of tough to read.” The Door Shakespeare hopes that by increasing opportunities for kids to see and hear Shakespeare before they read it, they’ll “get excited about it, instead of being intimidated by it.”

During the summer the company also offers Doorways, a theater program for children. Doorways provides children ages 7 to 17 the opportunity to work with the professional actors in

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the company and learn about ensemble work, practice stage combat, and delve deeper into Shakespeare’s works. Many of the professional actors who comprise Door Shakespeare and today teach for the program got their start through Doorways.

“Kids are amazing.” Ludwigsen says.

“We have little eight-year-olds come in and they want to be the witches in Macbeth, they want to say the words in Romeo and Juliet. They just love it. They tackle Shakespeare fearlessly, and it’s so much fun to watch.”

Ludwigsen credits the popularity and longevity of Shakespeare to his ability to humanize timeless ideas and themes: greed, love, desire, folly, ambition—often all in one play. Compare the plot of Julius Caesar to contemporary politics and the “anguish, conspiracy, and [lust for] political gain are all still totally relevant [today],” she says.

Shakespeare in Wisconsin— and beyond We have Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues in the King’s Men to thank for safeguarding his work for future generations. Produced seven years after Shakespeare’s death by colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell, the 1623 First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, including 18 that had never been printed before, and features the nowfamous portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.

Photo credit: Dan Meyers

ESSAY

Drawing on a broad range of experts and theater groups, the Shakespeare in Wisconsin MOOC connects participants with the Bard through an online, classroom-style discussion.

Sarah Marty is an arts educator and key player in the Madison-area arts scene.

A folio is a large book in which printed sheets are folded in half only once, creating two double-sided leaves, or four pages; it was an expensive production.

Even so, there must have been an incredible demand for Shakespeare folios at the time.

With only 235 of these First Folios in existence today, 82 of which are held by the Folger Shakespeare Library of Washington DC, they are rare treasures for those who seek to connect with the history of the Bard. To commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of his death, the Folger Shakespeare is sharing original First Folios of his work with all fifty states.

A First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s complete works will be exhibited at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison during November 2016. Working with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Chazen are providing numerous educational and performance opportunities through their website to go along with the exhibit.

Through a broader initiative called Shakespeare in Wisconsin, UW–Madison will present other Shakespeare-related artifacts from their Special Collections Library during the First Folio visit as well.

Sarah Marty, a performing arts faculty associate at UW–Madison’s Department of Continuing Studies, has been a key member of numerous Shakespeare projects over the years. Marty hopes the First Folio exhibit at the Chazen and related events will “provide a spark for conversations on many different levels. … This

UW–Madison’s Department of Continuing Studies to create a “Shakespearience Weekend” full of workshops, talks, tours, and shows at American Players Theatre for people who want to watch, discuss, and share Shakespeare’s work. Like the MOOC, the Shakespearience Weekend program has been renewed for the fall of 2016.

When asked what makes this 450-yearold playwright so special, Marty says that “it’s Shakespeare’s ability to show us humanity. Whether it’s goodness or it’s evil or just messy complexity … his talent as a writer is that he’s showing a range of ages, a range of experiences, a range of characters.” She attributes her compulsion to share Shakespeare with others to “a love of learning, a love of language, [and] a love of story”—all things, Marty notes, that Shakespeare captures in his work.

People such as Marty, Ludwigsen, DaVita, and the DiPrimas spend their lives trying to pinpoint what it is about Shakespeare and his work that makes him such a massive influence and continued presence in our society. It’s a question everyone can ask, and everyone can answer in their own way. As we remember the plays of the Bard, we must also remember that one of the most foundational components of theater is community. Thanks to Shakespeare, actors and audience alike can transcend barriers of space, time, and difference to join for a few moments of shared experience and human understanding. Z

book is hundreds of years old and it’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s this amazing, incredible object that someone held in their hands in the 1600s.”

One of Marty’s recent Shakespearerelated endeavors took her across print to stage to the Web through a popular MOOC (massive online open course) entitled Shakespeare in Community that explored the theme of community in his work and discussed how Shakespeare touches many different kinds of people.

The course, which will return in fall 2016, had over 22,000 participants from over 160 countries during its spring 2015 run.

When developing the MOOC, a guiding philosophy for Marty and partner Jesse Stommel (assistant professor of digital humanities at UW–Madison) was that you didn’t need to be an expert in literature or history to be part of the online conversation. Eschewing the traditional lecture format, Marty and Stommel created videos of Wisconsin Shakespeare lovers (including performers and production members of American Players Theatre and the Young Shakespeare Players) sharing their own opinions on and knowledge about Shakespeare. They paired these videos with discussion boards where MOOC participants could both respond to the content and share insights and opinions with each other.

Marty sought the help of UW–Madison associate professor of English Josh Calhoun in creating a real-life experience to complement the immersive atmosphere of the MOOC. The two partnered with W I S C O N S I N

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Recommendations from the Academy's forthcoming Waters of Wisconsin Initiative Report

The Wisconsin Academy’s initial Waters of Wisconsin (WOW) project facilitated a statewide conversation between 2000 and 2003 around one main question: How can we ensure healthy aquatic ecosystems and clean, abundant water supplies for tomorrow’s Wisconsin? Robust participation in this conversation over those years underscored the important role citizens have in the stewardship of our waters, and we found enthusiastic support for farsighted, science-based policies to manage our water legacy.

Overall, we found that Wisconsinites cherish water and see our waters as essential to our way of life in Wisconsin. Nationally, our state ranks twenty-fifth in land area but has the fourth highest area covered by water. Wisconsin is twentieth in population, but is second only to Florida in the number of fishing licenses sold each year. Clean water supports billions of dollars of economic activity through tourism, agriculture, and industry.

From the Northwoods cabin to the Port of Milwaukee to the Wisconsin Dells, water shapes our state identity. Our tradition of safeguarding Wisconsin’s waters is grounded in values such as responsibility to family and future generations, respect for land and wildlife, protecting public health and safety, and caring for water as a common good. These values are even enshrined in our state constitution under something called the Public

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Trust Doctrine, which states that our lakes and rivers are public resources, owned in common by all Wisconsin citizens.

These deeply held values have shaped a distinct conservation ethic here in Wisconsin, and its legacy has served many generations who depend upon and enjoy the waters of the state.

Through the WOW project the Wisconsin Academy identified the need to overcome the institutional and disciplinary separation of science, policy, and management protocols through a more integrated approach to water management. WOW also affirmed that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and other public agencies play a critical role in sound scientific application, citizen participation, and the practical implementation of policy, while balancing public and private interests toward the goal of a clean water future.

More than a decade has passed since our first statewide WOW conversation and the report that captured recommendations from its participants: Waters of Wisconsin: The Future of Our Aquatic Ecosystems and Resources. Drawing from a diverse and growing set of stakeholders from across the state, the Wisconsin Academy initiated a new conversation in 2012 to assess progress toward our 2003 recommendations and to review the status of waters in Wisconsin today.

REPORT

The result of this renewed conversation is Shifting Currents.

The new report is less an assessment of progress (as was hoped) than a catalogue of challenges to water quality, quantity, and aquatic ecosystems in Wisconsin. The report reviews the context and frameworks for public decision-making about water and explores the root causes (or “drivers”) that are shaping water challenges in Wisconsin. This is followed by a summary of current water issues, many of which had been identified in the 2003 report, and an outline of areas of progress, but also setbacks, since then, offering a deeper look at some seemingly intractable challenges such as phosphorus pollution, and groundwater contamination.

From the impairment of drinking water in Kewaunee County, to deep drawdowns of aquifers in the Central Sands Region, to the recent Legislative Audit Bureau report on the failure of the DNR to take enforcement action on 94% of sewage plants and industries that exceeded water pollution limits, the Academy believes there is a distinct need for science-based leadership in water today.

From its inception, the Wisconsin Academy’s Waters of Wisconsin Initiative has brought together diverse people from across the state, and from varied fields and areas of interest, to address challenges and seize opportunities related to our precious waters. We have done so as a matter both of principle and practical reality: the state of our waters reflects not only the ways we are interacting with them, but also with one another and our institutions. The WOW Initiative has aimed to provide guidance for Wisconsin citizens in sustaining the health of our water resources and aquatic ecosystems over the longterm. The specific recommendations we offer below continue this effort, resting upon a set of broad values that must underlie a sustainable water future in Wisconsin:

systems can be sustained only if we move toward this integrated approach, based on whole watersheds and entire ecosystems, including our human economy and the communities within it.

We embrace a commitment to sustainable and long-term water management approaches, as opposed to short-term “fixes” to immediate crises. Such crises are not just problems in themselves; they are symptoms of larger-scale and longer-term problems.

We are dedicated to intelligent adaptive management as a means to meet our long-term water stewardship responsibilities. This must be built into our water management approach as we plan actions and interventions, monitor outcomes, and adjust and adapt management going forward. Our water systems are dynamic, and so must be our efforts to work well with and within them.

We honor and welcome our Wisconsin tradition of citizen engagement in water stewardship in our communities, businesses, organizations, and governmental bodies. A fundamental aspect of this is the assurance of transparency in governmental decisions affecting all our citizens.

We challenge all our fellow citizens to be effective water stewards, to make every effort to anticipate and shape our water future as active and informed participants in our communities, our watersheds, and Wisconsin as a whole. Merely reacting to unwelcome change is not enough; we aim to engage in informed planning and cooperative caretaking of our shared waters—for ourselves, for future generations, and for all that depends on clean, abundant, and self-replenishing water in Wisconsin.

We recognize and honor Wisconsin’s unique array of water

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

resources and aquatic ecosystems, our history of both exploitation and recovery, and our evolving set of values and ethics with regard to water. In particular, we honor the Public Trust Doctrine, which ensures that our waters are held in trust for all citizens by the State of Wisconsin.

We are committed to science-based management and stewardship of all our waters. Science does not, and cannot by itself, determine appropriate management actions. But it plays an essential role in informing sound decision-making, providing the “sideboards” on uncertainty, and monitoring the effectiveness of our management actions and interventions.

We are committed to a more integrated and comprehensive approach to water management. As our waters are connected, so are our water problems and water stewardship opportunities. Fragmented, incremental, and piecemeal approaches to the interconnected waters of our state inevitably detract from sound

WISCONSIN ACADEMY INITIATIVES The Shifting Currents report was crafted by Jane Elder (Academy executive director), Meredith Keller (Initiatives program director), and a team of water science and policy experts from across Wisconsin, many of whom were part of the first Waters of Wisconsin Initiative more than a decade ago. The Initiatives convene leaders like these from an array of fields for deliberation, analysis, and distillation to identify strategies and solutions for a sustainable world. Our two current Initiatives focus on: Waters of Wisconsin: Safeguarding Wisconsin’s fresh water ecosystems and water supply.

Climate & Energy: Addressing climate change and diversifying energy choices.

Learn more about how this work serves our people, lands, and waters at wisconsinacademy.org/initiatives.

management and invite inefficiencies. Our water resources and

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In this context, the Academy recommends the following actions:

1 DEVELOP AN INTEGRATED WATER MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

Water issues inherently involve connections and continuity, yet our water policies remain fragmented across the landscape and in our institutions. To defend against inequities and to safeguard freshwater ecosystems, Wisconsin needs to bring its water management strategies up to date, learning from examples in neighboring states and provinces. As we recommended in 2003, Wisconsin still needs an integrated water management strategy that acknowledges and addresses the connections between ground and surface water systems, and the common and unique challenges in both the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds.

This strategy should include: • A statewide water conservation plan (fulfilling the requirement for a Wisconsin water conservation plan under the Great Lakes Compact).

• Enhanced groundwater protections that anticipate, assess, and mitigate the cumulative impacts of high-capacity wells.

• Steps to redress data collection gaps, specifically for monitoring wells.

• Steps to fully engage the scientific and technical community to ensure a management framework that is based on sound science and one that can also be supported by reliable technical capacities.

• A plan to protect and restore ecological and hydrological systems that are critical for our state’s groundwater recharge, water filtration, flood prevention, and for sustaining resilient and diverse aquatic habitat.

Wisconsin must take steps to reinvigorate water quality protections for drinking water and the healthy ecosystems that provide it through active prevention and also through restorative measures (wherever possible).

This includes: • Anticipating and regulating land-based as well as surface-water sources of pollution to sensitive aquifers such as the karst region in the Central Sands.

• Reducing pesticide applications across the state. Consider developing a state-level nutrient and pesticide reduction strategy that engages stakeholders in developing practices and solutions and sets targets for reductions in both the Great Lakes and Mississippi Basins.

• Increasing groundwater monitoring and reporting on quality as well as quantity.

In addition, Wisconsin needs to work with communities where the municipal drinking water systems still include lead service lines to ensure that people dependent on those systems are not at risk, and work to determine long-term strategies to remove lead pipes or reduce risks from them.

2 PROTECT DRINKING WATER

As an investment in Wisconsin’s long-term health and natural assets, Wisconsin should commit to wetland, shoreline, and streamside (riparian) conservation practices, and work with local communities and watershed organizations to develop strategies to restore and sustain hydrological and ecological functions that enhance water quality, groundwater re-charge, and habitat for native aquatic species.

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4 CONTROL NUTRIENT POLLUTION

5 PLAN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

6 MANAGE INVASIVE SPECIES

Building on more than a decade of concerted efforts from clean water advocates to curb nutrient and sediment pollution in water, the DNR in 2010 adopted a new suite of administrative rules aimed at cutting phosphorus loadings known as the Wisconsin Phosphorus Rule. Wisconsin needs to invest in the full implementation of the Wisconsin Phosphorus Rule by: • Providing communities with technical support and resources, and documenting and sharing successful practices that advance effective adaptive management.

• Examining existing best practices and finding ways to improve them.

• Exploring complex governing strategies, such as the Great Lakes Compact, that may contain useful approaches for integrating local and regional efforts.

• Identifying progress, successes, and lessons learned on nutrient reduction and erosion control through the Mississippi River Basin Initiative and the Clean Water Act Total Maximum Daily Load (the daily pollution threshold for phosphorus in a given water body) assessments and resulting strategies; • Evaluating the water impact of the Dairy 30 x 20 Initiative (a State of Wisconsin effort to produce 30 billion pounds of dairy products annually by 2020), and examining how farm policy overall is influencing net nutrient inputs in Wisconsin.

As we wrestle with the impacts of a changing climate, Wisconsin needs a game plan for addressing specific impacts on the state’s water. Building on the excellent work of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI), a collaborative project between the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at UW–Madison, we recommend developing and implementing a Wisconsin Climate Action Plan that includes: • Expanding Wisconsin’s capacity to reduce its carbon emissions and enhance natural carbon storage in natural and farmed landscapes.

• Building freshwater adaptation capacity and resilience through local and regional infrastructure planning coupled with ecological conservation and restoration strategies.

• Increasing public understanding of the limits to adaptation and how to anticipate irreversible consequences.

• Disseminating information about climate change impacts on Wisconsin’s waters to planners and decision-makers for water infrastructure (both drinking water and wastewater systems), habitat management, municipalities, regional planning authorities, and other water managers.

Aquatic invasive species can destroy the ecology of our lakes and streams. To control, slow, and eliminate the spread of aquatic invasive species, Wisconsin needs to • Consider support for opportunities to ecologically separate the Lake Michigan and Mississippi Basin watersheds in cooperation with other Great Lakes states.

• Support and expand educational efforts to raise awareness among commercial shippers, boaters, and others to prevent the further spread of aquatic invasive species.

• Support research on 1) the effect of the spread of invasive species; 2) why some bodies of water are more susceptible to invasion than others; and 3) alternative means of controlling the spread of invasives.

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An investment in our water infrastructure can improve both human and environmental health. Municipalities, drinking water and wastewater utilities, sewerage districts, and other units of local government should work together to identify urgent needs for new construction that will modernize sewage treatment capacities and protect drinking water from contaminant exposure. With priorities identified, these local entities should work with state and federal governments to secure a plan and funding mechanisms to address both routine and critical maintenance.

7 MODERNIZE WATER INFRASTRUCTURE

Citizens, communities, organizations, and businesses throughout Wisconsin have a strong stake in water policy decisions. Yet our public dialogue has been marked by polarization, lack of access to critical information and ideas, and constrained and abbreviated approaches to public engagement and deliberation. We urge those engaged in setting and implementing policy to examine public engagement processes and reinvigorate efforts to provide citizens of the state with meaningful mechanisms to engage in shaping, deliberating, and implementing water policies in Wisconsin through open dialogue, transparency, and timely response to queries and requests for information.

8 COMMIT TO TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Reaffirming the recommendations from the first WOW report, we need to better articulate the pressing and emerging water concerns in Wisconsin and help people understand the economic, environmental, and social consequences of our decisions about water.

Education and public engagement strategies should include concerted efforts to educate all Wisconsinites, from elementary students to policy makers, about basic water science and social science, water history and water ethics, the role of water in our economy, the policy-making process for water, and the Public Trust Doctrine and what it means for our water resources.

9 INVEST IN WATER LITERACY

CONNECT: Get the Shifting Currents Report In 2003, the first Waters of Wisconsin (WOW) Initiative released its capstone report: Waters of Wisconsin: The Future of Our Aquatic Ecosystem. Recognizing that many of the same challenges still affect our waters today, the Academy revisited the 2003 recommendations in 2012, while exploring new and more complex threats. These observations are distilled in Shifting Currents, a brief update to the 2003 WOW report that explores recent changes in biological, chemical, political, ethical, and other approaches and conditions of water and water management in Wisconsin. Designed for water

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researchers, local government leaders, and engaged citizens alike, the report is the culmination of three years of work with a network of leaders across many areas of expertise, with the collective goal of advancing leadership and stewardship for the waters of Wisconsin. As always, our aim is to foster nonpartisan, science-based strategies and solutions to safeguard Wisconsin’s freshwater ecosystems and water supply for generations to come.

For more information on the Shifting Currents report, visit wisconsinacademy.org/shiftingcurrents.

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

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SHATTERPROOF: THE STORIES OF JACK RITCHIE

BY RICHARD BOUDREAU

E

ven though he is Wisconsin’s most productive writer of short stories, you might not know about Milwaukee-born author Jack Ritchie. A writer of hard-boiled crime fiction, Richie wrote nearly five hundred

stories over his thirty-five-year career.

His writing features characters that rely on cunning and wit to get them out of difficult situations and a straightforward style that eschews elaborate description for narrative tension. In a nod to O. Henry, another prolific writer of short stories, Ritchie often ends his tales of murder and mayhem not with one surprise but two—and even, on occasion, three.

Born John George Reitci (February 26, 1922), Ritchie did not assume his pen name until he began his writing career in his early thirties. His father was a tailor in Milwaukee; his mother, a housewife.

Following graduation from high school, he attended Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) for a time.

When World War II came along. Richie enlisted and spent three and a half years in the Army, mostly in the Pacific. It was on the island of Kwajalein that a bored Ritchie, desperate for reading material, began devouring the mystery novels of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and John D. MacDonald.

While he soon became addicted to the mystery genre, Richie was not yet writing his own stories.

After an honorable discharge from the Army, Ritchie tried school again under the GI Bill, but gave it over to work with his father in tailoring—a temporary arrangement, he hoped.

Inspired by his mother, who had recently joined a writer’s group in Milwaukee and harbored her own dreams of literary recognition, Ritchie tried his hand at a few stories, mainly about sports.

When literary agent Larry Sternig dropped by to talk to his mother, Ritchie handed him a recently composed sports story. The next day Sternig called Ritchie and encouraged him to continue writing.

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Ritchie decided to write fifty stories in a year and see if any sold. His eighth attempt connected. Sternig, who became Ritchie’s longtime friend and agent, sold his first story to the New York Daily News for $50. “Always the Season” was published on December 29, 1953, marking the beginning of a long and fruitful career.

His earliest stories—sports, romance, science fiction—appeared during the 1950s in such diverse publications as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Smashing Detective Stories, and Good Housekeeping. He soon found his niche and his first major publisher in Manhunt Detective Stories Monthly, which was based in New York City. The world’s best-selling crime fiction magazine, Manhunt seemed a perfect match for Ritchie, eventually printing 23 of his stories—the most enduring of them, “Shatterproof.”

At a time of waning popularity for the short story, Manhunt was one of the few magazines that featured only short mystery and crime stories. Ritchie had no trouble adapting his developing talent to the newly popular genres. When Alfred Hitchcock started his own Mystery Magazine in 1956, Ritchie, along with fellow Wisconsinite Robert Bloch of Psycho fame, began appearing in that magazine as well. Both often had stories in the same issue.

Soon Ritchie’s stories were cropping up in Hitchcock’s monthly Mystery Magazine four or five times a year, then six, then nine, and, finally in 1961, thirteen times (he had two in one issue). From 1957 to 1982 well over a hundred of Ritchie’s stories, as well as eight under the pen name Steve O’Connell, appeared in the magazine, and there were few Hitchcock anthologies during those years that did not include at least one of Ritchie’s (and one of Bloch’s) stories.

At least three Ritchie stories were adapted for the TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from 1955 to 1962.

When Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine started in 1976, Ritchie wrote for that as well, appearing in its pages at least thirty times.

Ritchie’s early stories were short in length, terse in style, and murderous in subject matter. He never wasted a word.

From the first sentence, “He was a softfaced man wearing rimless glasses, but he

handled the automatic with unmistakable confidence” (from “Shatterproof”), to the last comment—sometimes a single word, never more than a sentence—Ritchie wrung every last drop of dark humor and pathos from sometimes as few as 1,000 words. (He once said that had he written Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the 30,000word section on the sewers of Paris would

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Ritchie’s early stories were short in length, terse in style, and

murderous in subject matter. He never wasted a word.

have come out as a paragraph or two.)

A number of his stories feature familiar Wisconsin streets, highways, and locations, particularly around Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee Lakefront, Lake Shore Drive, and even the pedestrian bridge down from the East Side serve as backdrops for burglary, larceny, and murder.

Capitol Drive appears frequently in Ritchie’s early stories, and Third and Wisconsin, Wells, 68th Street, and the 27th Street and 35th Street viaducts figure in others. County General Hospital, variously named suburbs, an outstate community or two, and even Taycheedah prison for women are mentioned. In a sly homage to his home state, nearly all of the drinks served to or by his characters contain brandy.

A Ritchie story provides little description and relies heavily on exposition through dialogue punctuated with wry commentary from a narrator who could be a convict or a con artist, a warden or a blackmailer, a murderer or a fraud, a private eye or a detective, a victim or an innocent bystander. And at the end, the expectations of the reader are often flummoxed through a neat twist or two that surprise, but never disappoint.

In “The Customer” (Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, March 1983), a middleaged man sits down at a table at the I D E A S

country club and begins a conversation with a man he has been told is a contract killer. Fearing entrapment, the narrator of the story, whom we learn is indeed a contract killer, proceeds with caution.

Eventually he lets down his guard, and the two come to terms. When the second man pushes a small wrapped package toward the narrator and identifies himself as Lieutenant Walter Morgan of the police department, it seems the killer’s worst fears have been realized. But, in another twist, we learn Morgan is earnest about having his wife murdered.

The two agree on the time and place to provide an alibi for Morgan, and the killer accepts the $5,000—less than his usual fee, but adequate—to seal the deal. Twist number three comes when the killer realizes that the Lieutenant knows too much and that he—rather than his wife—needs to disappear.

Lest the reader think these stories are glum, there is plenty of humor amidst the homicide. Some suggest that Ritchie may have picked up his streak of dark humor from friend and fellow Wisconsin mystery writer Craig Rice. Known as “the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction,” Rice penned dozens of detective stories and novels that incorporated sometimes witty and sometimes screwball comedic elements.

This comedic touch is found in “The Violet Business” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1971) when the agents for a particular killer contact him by running an ad in the paper about a lost black and white collie answering to the name Violet. The client, a man named Lynch, wants himself killed, shot through the heart: “A wise choice,” the narrator responds, “and neat. Most people prefer the open coffin viewing.”

Lynch has decided that the best thing he can do for his wife and two children is to die so they can collect on his large insurance policy. The killer accepts the $5,000 down payment, but his suspicions have been aroused. He goes early to the distant town, books a room, and discovers two things: Lynch is unmarried and he is running for DA. The whole thing smells of a setup.

Returning to his hotel room without carrying out his contract, the killer finds the local chief of police already there with some damning evidence in one hand and

a police revolver in the other. But what charge could be made? Murder? He didn’t kill Lynch. It is only then that the reader learns our hired killer has never killed anyone. Rather, he plays the murder-forhire game, collects the money, and then warns the interested parties.

“In short, we saved lives, and made a rather nice profit doing so,” the narrator informs us. The police chief, of course, does not know what we know. It seems that the arrest of this “murderer” is inevitable when the story takes another twist as the chief negotiates the murder of his own wife for $4,000 in cash, leaving the narrator to decide if he will become the murderer he has always claimed to be or go to jail.

It is this sort of forthright indirection (or hidden misdirection) that is a Ritchie trademark: the reader is led along by a somewhat neutral narrator through a perfectly logical series of events only to face a complication or two that force a re-interpretation of both plot and character.

Things are never what they seem in a Ritchie story, and the array of flim-flam artistry is incredible. Just as often as not, the con artist is the one who gets conned in Ritchie’s world, forcing the characters to exercise all their cunning in an effort to extricate themselves from a situation— or even to save their lives. And running under it all is a keen satirical wit, making fun of murder, yes, but also of academics, artists, country club members, lawyers, judges, politicians, and other social elites.

Perhaps Ritchie’s most famous story is “The Green Heart” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1963), which was adapted for the cinema as A New Leaf, starring Elaine May and Walter Matthau.

The short story, which can be read in twenty minutes, takes almost two hours to unravel on the big screen. It begins with this beauty of brevity: “We had been married three months and I rather thought it was time to get rid of my wife.”

The 45-year-old, ne’er-do-well narrator, William Graham (Matthau in the movie), has wooed and wed an ingenuous, klutzy, and unstylishly dressed professor Henrietta Lowell (Elaine May), who just happens to be rich. While she talks with him about their annual trip to the Northwoods to find specimens for her botany

Photo credit: Steven Reitci

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Ricthie in 1980 poses for a cover photo for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

From SHATTERPROOF (1960) I had been making a drink in my study when I heard him and turned. Now I finished pouring from the decanter. “I know the enemies I’ve made and you are a stranger. Was it my wife?”

He smiled. “Quite correct. Her motive must be obvious.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have money and apparently she wants it. All of it.”

He regarded me objectively. “Your age is?”

“Fifty-three.”

“And your wife is?”

“Twenty-two.”

He clicked his tongue. “You were foolish to expect anything permanent, Mr. Williams.”

I sipped the whisky. “I expected a divorce after a year or two and a painful settlement. Not death.”

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Photo credit: Steven Reitci

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Photos taken in 1959 show Jack Richie and wife Rita (right) after relocating to Fort Atkinson from a log cabin in Washington Island, Door County.

research, he is running over in his mind the various methods and opportunities to do her in. In the meantime, Graham fires a number of servants who were on the take at the house, and serves poisoned scotch to a black-mailer who has taken advantage of his naïve wife’s generosity. “That confirmed a suspicion of mine,” coolly notes Graham. “People who drink Scotch have no sense of taste.”

On their honeymoon Lowell had found what she suspects is a new plant species and names it for him: Alsophila grahamicus. Just before the subsequent Northwoods trip, Lowell receives confirmation of the classification and presents Graham with a piece of the fern encased in plastic. He is pleased, but undeterred from planning her demise even after he is forced to kill yet another interloper—with the leftover poisoned Scotch.

On their first day in the Northwoods, Graham and Lowell canoe down a river and run into heavy rapids. He is, of course, inexperienced, and their canoe capsizes. Though he makes it to shore, Lowell clings to rock in the middle of the rapids. He shouts directions to her, only to learn that she can’t swim. After all his plotting, how easy this is going to be, he reflects. Graham tells her to slip into the current, and he will catch her as she comes down. She lets go, and as he turns his back to the river and her

likely demise his attention is attracted by the plastic-encased Alsophila grahamicus, which has fallen from his pocket.

It strikes him how total her trust in him really is. Perhaps he feels something for her as he turns about, plunges into the water, and saves her life.

Romantic? Humorous? Psychotic? “The Green Heart” is a masterpiece of ingenious, entertaining writing.

On the heels of the movie’s release, Ritchie published his first collection of short stories. A New Leaf and Other Stories drew on the notoriety of the film, but there were seventeen other marvelous tales, all but two culled from Hitchcock’s magazine. One story, “Shatterproof” (Manhunt, October 1960), might be the best Ritchie ever wrote.

“Shatterproof” begins with a wealthy middle-aged man finding himself at the wrong end of a gun. The rich man learns that his young wife, impatient for his money (all of it), has hired a contract killer. The rich man obligingly fixes drinks for his guest and himself, then sits across from the killer. Inveigling the killer twice to look away for a moment, the narrator then stands, takes a glass from the table, and locks it within his safe.

The killer is puzzled at the action at first, then dismayed as he is forced to question whether the glass locked in the safe is the rich man’s or his own—with his

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fingerprints on it. Exploiting the killer’s doubt, the narrator uses the leverage of the incriminating glass to renegotiate his death contract. Only after the killer leaves to murder the rich man’s wife do we learn that the glass in the safe actually belongs to the narrator. It was all a bluff of magnificent chutzpah.

In its dialogue, sardonic commentary, deception, and cold-bloodedness, “Shatterproof” ranks with Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Poe’s story ran to about 1,600 words; Ritchie’s, about the same. It was just such expertise that prompted mystery writer and critic, Anthony Boucher, to write: What I like most about Jack Ritchie’s work is its exemplary neatness. No word is wasted, and many words serve more than one purpose. Exposition disappears; all needed facts are deftly inserted as the narrative flows forward.

Ritchie can write a long short story that is virtually the equivalent of a full suspense novel; and his very short stories sparkle as lapidary art.

A later story, “Absence of Emily” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1981), is a Ritchie tour de force. Everything points to the narrator, Albert, having done away with his short, too plump wife, Emily. A widower whose previous wife died in a

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boating accident, Albert appears anxious when asked by friends and family where Emily has gone. Meanwhile, Emily’s rich and overbearing cousin Millicent takes it upon herself to discover her whereabouts. When she sneaks into their home and finds Emily’s closet full of clothes and luggage, Millicent begins a systematic campaign to entrap her “poor cousin’s” murderous husband.

Unbeknownst to Millicent (and the reader) Albert is carefully cultivating an aura of suspicion. He takes a shovel to the back of the estate and begins to exhume something under cover of darkness only to be immediately surrounded by a group of hired detectives and cousin Millicent. Millicent orders the detectives to excavate the area in search of Emily’s corpse, but they find nothing. An innocent Albert threatens to sue, but says he will forego such public embarrassment for some financial consideration—and Millicent agrees to a large consideration.

A week later and thirty pounds lighter, Emily emerges from a month-long stay at a health farm. She didn’t want her nosy cousin to know about the trip, and had instructed Albert to get rid of her old clothes, a task he spun into a web of deceit that eventually yielded a financial windfall. With Millicent’s “consideration” in hand, Albert assures Emily that she can now replace her entire wardrobe. “ A b s en ce of E m ily” is a g e m of a story, reflecting the author’s multifacted writing talents. The same year it appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the story was included in The Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories (Dutton, 1983). At the Mystery Writers of America annual meeting Ritchie’s story won the prestigious Edgar Award—a small bust of Edgar Allen Poe—for the best short suspense story of the year. It was a high point in Ritchie’s career.

In the meantime his personal life was undergoing change. He and his wife, fellow writer, Rita Reitcie, divorced after twenty years of marriage. Alone now, he settled into an apartment in Fort Atkinson and continued to churn out classic Ritchie stories, most destined for the Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s magazines.

Then in April, 1983, he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 61. Even after

his death, Ritchie’s stories continued to appear in the magazines and in various collections. Mystery writer Lawrence Block was one among many who patiently waited for every Ritchie story, whether new or reprint. “His work was sprightly and surprising and always engaging,” Block wrote in an article in American Heritage magazine, “and he never wrote an awkward sentence or a lifeless line of dialogue.”

“Ritchie’s work was sprightly and surprising and always engaging … and he never wrote an awkward sentence or a lifeless line of dialogue.”

Four years after Ritchie’s death, Southern Illinois University Press published The Adventures of Henry Turnbuckle (1987), thirty stories involving the titular character, most published in the last six years of Ritchie’s life and three posthumously. Henry Turnbuckle began the series as a Milwaukee patrolman who unfortunately for his career had arrested the mayor’s son for drunken driving.

Despite this setback, Turnbuckle works his way up to detective sergeant on the city’s police force, homicide division.

The humor in the stories comes from the elaborate theories Turnbuckle develops to explain seemingly random pieces of evidence, some as inconsequential as a cigarette butt or a toothpick.

There is always some discrepancy or something outrageous in the conclusions he draws, which are generally wrong.

Frustrated, Turnbuckle takes a glass of sherry, then, perhaps after another such elaboration or two, stumbles into the solution of the case.

The whole series is really an elaborate send-up of formulaic mystery stories, from the locked room puzzle to

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the hard-boiled private eye. “Suspicion is my business,” Turnbuckle points out, whether as shamus or sergeant. Eventually Ritchie gives him a partner, Ralph, who is continually amazed and frustrated at the “detecting abilities” of his sergeant, commenting, “Henry, you can get more out of less than anybody I know.”

The Turnbuckle stories were very popular, appearing primarily Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s magazines. At the same time, as if anticipating today’s obsession with the undead, Ritchie’s Count Cardula stories began to appear.

A vampire-turned-private eye, Cardula (his name an anagram for Dracula) works only at night. Ritchie has fun with little touches, such as Cardula needing to work to pay off the debt on his mansion along the lake, the unusual working hours from sunset to sunrise, and his odd sleeping arrangements. But Cardula is just as astute as some of Ritchie’s other characters. Only a handful of the stories, however, were completed before his death.

In 1989 St. Martin’s Press brought out Little Boxes of Bewilderment, a collection of thirty short mysteries by Ritchie, some of which had appeared earlier in A New Leaf. Francis M. Nevins, the same editor who assembled the Henry Tumbuckle stories, brought these together as well. In the extensive introduction to the collection. Nevins characterizes Ritchie’s wonderful narratives: More and more often he’d cook up one of his corkscrew plots, add black humor and an unmistakably personal narrative voice, get it down on paper with a bare minimum of words, and end up with a story inimitably his own.

That is praise indeed, providing a fitting epitaph for a remarkable writer and Wisconsin native, Jack Ritchie. But no amount of description, criticism, or summary is adequate for Ritchie. There is no substitute for the hands on experience of his unique style of storytelling.

These stories must be read and savored by the individual reader in order to understand how Ritchie’s prose is truly shatterproof. Z

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listening to the

beads

BY ANNE PRYOR

T

here is an arts resurgence occurring across Wisconsin.

Women and, occasionally, men, sit around tables with containers of colorful, glistening beads close at hand.

Steel needle and waxed thread move deftly through paper and velvet amidst exchanges of advice on technique, opinion on color, or philosophy on culture. Updates on families are mixed in too, reflecting the tight social bonds between many of the beaders. Above all, frequent eruptions of laughter illustrate a shared joy in having gathered to bead.

Left: A raised beadwork picture frame with strawberry motif by Loretta Webster (2014).

The frame holds a photograph of Webster's father, Walter House, taken in Seymour, Wisconsin, circa 1920.

All photos by Anne Pryor unless otherwise indicated.

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In and around such cities as Green Bay, Stevens Point, and Milwaukee, members of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin are leading a local renaissance in Iroquois raised beadwork. Unlike flat beadwork in which sewn beads lie flush with the surface of fabric or leather, raised beadwork is characterized by lines of beads that arch above the textile surface, creating an extra dimension like bas relief sculpture. The design aesthetic in raised Iroquois beadwork ranges from simple floral patterns to highly ornate shapes with exuberant finishing elements like tassels or scalloped edges. The objects created are often functional, like picture frames or pieces of clothing, highly decorative, and extremely beautiful.

But this art form is about more than beauty. Raised beadwork has powerful cultural and historic meanings for members of the Oneida Nation. Along with the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, the Oneida are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy based in New York

This art form is about more than beauty. Raised beadwork has powerful cultural and historic meanings for members of the Oneida Nation.

State and Lower Ontario. Wisconsin’s Oneida artists lay claim to Iroquois raised beadwork as part of their cultural heritage, even though they left their homelands in the 1820s, before this style of beadwork was developed.

As Beth Bashara, the director of the Oneida Nation Arts Program, explains, “The emotional pain and isolation from relocation and being separated from the rest of the Iroquois Confederacy has been felt in this community since Oneidas first arrived in Wisconsin. To this day, elders talk about how their elders, and their elders, talked about the homelands and the move to Wisconsin. … For this community, beadwork connects people to their original culture, their homelands, and their brothers and sisters in the Iroquois Confederacy.”

Connections between Wisconsin Oneida beaders and their sister and brother beaders in western New York and lower Ontario have occurred in different forms over many years.

In Wisconsin, this often meant weeklong classes taught by established bead artists to interested beaders on the Oneida reservation. Some Wisconsin Oneidas traveled to New York and Canada to visit historic collections, attend international conferences, participate in regional or international art shows, and take public or private classes from Eastern Iroquois raised beadwork artists. Support for these connections came not only from the beaders themselves, but also from funding structures within the Oneida Nation as well as the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Because of the contributions these beaders are making to the cultural vitality of the community, the Oneida Nation is actively encouraging the pursuit and application of this art form. This 36

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is with good reason. A 2013 study by First People’s Fund found that creative production and artistic expression through media like beadwork preserves tradition, maintains cultural identity, and strengthens spiritual values in Native communities. The raised Iroquois beadwork produced today by Oneida artists “demonstrate[s] the economic development potential of Native cultural assets,” transforming what was once a cultural loss into a cultural gain.

Learning an Old Tradition The rise of Iroquois raised beadwork in Wisconsin can be traced back to the early 1990s when Samuel Thomas first came to the Oneida Reservation to share his skill and knowledge.

A member of the Lower Cayuga Band of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Ontario, Thomas is a self-taught beader who has gained regional and international renown for his art. He has pieces in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institute, and is a recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Award. Thomas has also led collaborative beading projects in places such as East Africa.

Starting in 1998, Thomas and his mother, Lorna Hill, also Cayuga, annually taught classes in Oneida. These classes were greeted with ardent enthusiasm. “I went to that first class and I was just hooked because it’s such a different way of beading,” recalls Loretta Webster, a member of the Oneida Nation who has played key roles as a community arts leader, including establishing the Woodland Indian Art Show and Market, an art competition and market showcasing the unique artistic styles of Native American Nations from the Midwest and eastern regions of the United States.

Thomas’ aesthetic favors a minimalist color palette, harkening back to one of the original styles within Iroquois raised beadwork. According to Beverly Gordon, an emerita faculty in Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pieces made by Tuscarora beaders around the 1850s used a combination of clear crystal and white chalk seed beads, or all crystal beads; occasional bugle beads of the same hue might be added as accent.

Using this basic approach but enhancing it, “Thomas developed a unique style by studying old pieces in museums and private collections and then adding his own artistic flair,” writes archaeologist and collector Dolores Elliott in “Iroquois Beadwork: A Haudenosaunee Tradition and Art,” a paper presented at the 2002 Conference on Iroquois Research.

A member of the Oneida Nation who grew up in Kenosha and began doing flat beadwork in the 1970s, Laura Manthe turned to raised beadwork after taking Thomas’ class. “We give him a lot of credit in our community for reviving an art that was lost here,” she says.

In a model that is still used today by the Oneida circle, Thomas would instruct his students by introducing a new project, such as a barrette or a purse, each week. During this time, students were encouraged to ask questions of the instructor, make aesthetic choices, and hone beading skills.

This process reinforces the elements of quality in raised Iroquois beadwork. At the most basic level, the workmanship must be excellent, with no visible knots or loose threads. The

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Top image: April Jordan (center) and other beaders participate in a beading workshop with Rosemary Rickard Hill, sponsored by the Oneida Nation Arts Program, 2015. Photo by Betty Willems.

Middle row detail images: (l to r) James Kelly, tablemat, 2013. Loretta Webster, “Medicine Kastowe” headdress, 2015. Stefanie Sikorowski, “Promise Box” box with lid, 2014.

Bottom row detail images: (l to r) Christine Munson, “Seasons“ small purse, 2011. James Kelly, bag, 2011. Christine Munson, “Metamorphosis“ shoulder bag, 2009.

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Top row: (l to r) Mary Vvalther, beading workshop with Rosemary Rickard Hill, sponsored by the Oneida Nation Arts Program, 2013.

Sandra Westcott Gauthier, barrette, 2013.

Middle row: (l to r) Sandra Westcott Gauthier, Victorian jewel holder, 2013. Yuntle McLester, beading workshop with Rosemary Rickard Hill, sponsored by the Oneida Nation Arts Program, 2013.

Bottom row: (l to r) Betty Willems, Victorian Boot Pincushion Whimsey, 2011. Photo by Betty Willems. Judith L. Jourdan, cuff, 2016.

Photo by Dennis King/dkingofimagez.com.

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beads must be sewn tightly with even tension—but not so tight as to pucker the fabric. Materials should be of the best possible quality; for some beaders, this means use of glass beads exclusively. The overall design must be pleasing; for some of the advanced beaders, this means intricacy with more elements rather than fewer, like some historic pieces in which barely any of the background fabric is visible.

Another advanced technique that adds complexity is to use a wide variety of bead sizes in a single piece. “It makes it pop,” Oneida beader Betty Willems enthuses. The choice of colors needs to be appropriate to the piece as well, with the various hues skillfully shaded if multiple colors are used, or not too many colors incorporated if a minimalist approach is being employed.

Sandra Westcott Gauthier (Oneida and Menominee), who travels to Oneida regularly from her home in Keshena to bead with others, says she only gradually learned what is perhaps the most important part of the beading process. “When I first started, I used to ask for help in everything that I did and finally one day, to one of the ladies, Carol Bauman, I said, ‘What color should I use here, or, what should I do with this [area]’ Carol said, ‘Let the beads talk to you.’ ” “And the beads have been talking to me ever since,” says Gauthier.

In 2000, the Oneida beading circle invited a new teacher who would prove to have “explosive influence” on how they approached their art, according to Oneida artist Judith Jourdan.

Rosemary Rickard Hill is a respected Tuscarora beader who uses a wide range of colors in her beadwork. Her own family history reflects the history of this art form, for among the Tuscarora raised beadwork is a uninterrupted tradition across the generations.

In an interview during her most recent visit to Wisconsin, Hill discussed the enduring legacy of raised beadwork, “It’s always been with us; we’ve never lost it. We’ve only improved on it: improved with color, different ways to put it together, stronger ways, sturdier ways.”

Hill grew up on the Tuscarora reservation in western New York, close to Niagara Falls. She learned beadwork from her mother, aunt, and grandmother beginning around age seven and progressing in skill so that by age twelve she could sew both flatwork and raised work. Hill recalls beading as a fun family time.

Her family did what generations of earlier Tuscarora artists had done; they sold their handmade wares to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, carrying all supplies and display materials with them each morning to a designated spot adjacent to the Falls. Tourists were plentiful because, during the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls had developed into one of the most popular places to visit in North America. (A Wisconsin parallel would be the sale of cultural art to Wisconsin Dells tourists by the Ho-Chunk people during the 1950s.)

As Ruth Phillips, a scholar of historic Native souvenir art, explains, “Impelled by economic need, virtually all Native groups living in proximity to Euro-Canadian settlements developed commodity productions of both utilitarian trade wares and ‘fancy’ souvenir goods.”

The ornate raised beadwork perfected by Tuscarora and other Iroquois artists fell into both categories: these pieces appealed to Victorian aesthetics and proved extremely popular as souvenirs. So popular were they that there are thousands of these period pieces in homes and at galleries today, despite the relative fragility of textile art over time.

The commercial aspect of their beading heritage resonates with contemporary Oneida raised beaders who make a living as artists. A self-described “cultural artist,” Judith Jourdan’s mission is to learn as much as she can about all Oneida cultural arts. To Jourdan, learning and sharing this knowledge with her community is the best way to ensure that beading lives on in perpetuity. While she identifies foremost as a doll maker,

Beading circles in Wisconsin provide a place of instruction for beginners, access to needed materials, and advice for anyone who wants to learn how to share in the rich heritage of raised beading.

Jourdan is an especially creative beader and is well regarded as an innovative artist and teacher. Jourdan respects the commercial heritage of the art form. “This was how we lived; this was what fed us, supported us. I enjoy it, but this was a lifestyle, a way to survive,” she says, adding “That it’s beautiful is just a plus.”

In Oneida communities today, some of the expert beaders continue this commercial dimension of the work. They sell their pieces at national and local art fairs or to museums for their permanent collections; two notable purchases were by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which bought Karen Ann Hoffman’s three-sided “Wampum Urn,” and the Iroquois Indian Museum in New York, which bought Loretta Webster’s cuffs beaded with a “Three Sisters” motif (corn, beans, and squash).

Some beaders take special orders for powwow regalia or ceremonial attire; Loretta Webster and Betty Willems are especially active with commissions from community members in Oneida.

Others eschew commissions because they impinge on their artistic freedom and time. Still other beaders treat their creations as gifts to give away to family.

No matter what the approach to sharing their work, beaders often keep the very first piece they made. “You have to hold on to those pieces so you have something to compare it to later,” explains Laura Manthe, laughing at the difference between her current skilled work and her very first piece.

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Judith Jourdan, yoke and cuffs

Judith Jourdan, yoke, cuffs, belt buckle, leggings

In the Circle Beading has become a shared activity that builds community while providing fun and inspiration to participants. Following a pattern identified by the First People’s Fund, Native artists expand skills and opportunities primarily through informal social networks such as beading circles. In Wisconsin, beading circles provide a place of instruction for beginners, access to needed materials, and advice for anyone who wants to learn how to share in the rich heritage of raised beading.

“For me, it’s [about] setting time aside,” says Laura Manthe.

“This is the time that I can do it, and I really enjoy everyone’s company. I really love the advice other people give.”

Loretta Webster started the Oneida beading circle in 2009 at her Bear Paw Keepsakes. Opened in 2006 on the Oneida Reservation just outside of Green Bay, Bear Paw increasingly became a beading destination as Webster spent some of her time there each day working on raised beadwork projects. Other beaders began to drop in to bead with her or to ask for advice on how to finish a piece. To help organize her time, Webster established Saturday as the drop-in day.

When Bear Paw Keepsakes closed in 2012, leadership of the beading circle transferred to Betty Willems, who hosted it in 40

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her large finished basement. With long rows of tables, excellent lighting, and plenty of room for sharing food, it became a perfect new home for the beading circle. Willems hosted until 2016 when the circle transitioned to a local community center.

April Jordan, an emerging organizer among the beaders in Oneida, is grateful for the sense of community and support she finds in the circle. “That’s what I like about the beading circle.

They give you everything and help you get started.”

This is a critical issue for many beginning artists, as access to adequate supplies can be a major hurdle in getting started. Referring to Betty Willems, Jordan says that she “always gives me a bunch of stuff. When I put it on my beadwork I think of her so it’s not just me beading, it’s everybody there.”

Long-time beader Jim Kelly is largely self taught. Based in Milwaukee, Kelly occasionally joins a beading circle or takes a class in Oneida. He emphasizes that for the final product to be good, the beader must have the right attitude. “We burn cedar or sage when we start to give us a good feeling about this,” he says. “We don’t want anger or hatred; sometimes you feel real frustrated because you start beading and it’s not working out. It’s like you have to start all over again. So you stop and realize you forgot the first step in your process and it’s your medicines.”

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Loretta Webster (left) and Karen Ann Hoffman (right), Oneida, 2016

When he can, Kelly joins the circle hosted by Karen Ann Hoffman at her home in Stevens Point. For those like Kelly who do not live on or near the Oneida reservation, Hoffman’s invitation to fellow raised Iroquois beaders to sit at her table is too good to pass up. An active promoter of raised beadwork in Wisconsin, Hoffman often speaks on the subject and exhibits her work at locations across the state.

Hoffman first learned raised beadwork at the class taught by Samuel Thomas and Lorna Hill in Oneida during the early 1990s.

Since retiring from her sales job in 2013, Hoffman has made Iroquois raised beadwork her primary focus, producing more large pieces each year and pursuing her goal of increased public recognition of Iroquois raised beadwork as a fine art. She is one of the main Wisconsin advocates of the minimalist approach to color; her pieces are often comprised of primarily crystal or white beads on a dark background.

Hoffman has adhered to the aesthetic first learned from her teachers, and in turn passes on these principles to students like Christine Munson. Munson, who had to suspend regular weekly attendance at the beading circle due to the demands of graduate school, intends to return now that she has earned her degree in Student Affairs Administration from the University of Wisconsin– La Crosse.

“How I prefer to bead is with a group of people,” Munson explains. “It’s just part of the beadwork process itself, all the stories that we’re telling, the jokes that are going on, what happened last week—that all gets beaded into the pieces. It becomes part of the project.”

Hoffman reminds her students that it is very important to pay attention to the narrative being told through the beadwork. “You get to choose one thing in your beadwork. You get to choose the story you’re going to tell,” she says. “After that, all you have to do is back up, get out of the way, and bead—because it is now in charge. The story determines the colors. … Our challenge is to let the story speak in its most clear voice.”

Regaining the Past While beading has been an identity-based art for generations of Native Americans, Iroquois raised beadwork is providing Wisconsin Oneidas a special path to their Haudenosaunee identity. Many of the older beaders began working with flat or loom beading, an art form they could relate to as Native Americans but not specifically as Oneidas. Through Iroquois raised beadwork, Oneida artists today feel a stronger connection with their own tribe’s past. As Sandra Westcott Gauthier explains, “It makes W I S C O N S I N

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Top: Cape made collaboratively by participants in Rosemary Rickard Hill's first workshop at Oneida Nation Arts Program, 2000.

Bottom row: Details from Oneida Nation Arts Program workshop cape.

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people look back at what we used to have, what we used to be.

That’s how I look at it. … It lets people know that what we are doing is bringing back what we once lost.”

Now that they have regained the past through intensive study, research, and practice, Wisconsin’s raised beadwork artists are inventing new directions in which to take their art. Betty Willems emphasizes this when she explains, “We still have our past and we can expand that and make it better.”

A specific example of moving in a new direction is a challenge given to the Oneida beading community by instructor Rosemary Rickard Hill. When Hill began teaching in Wisconsin, she told the beaders that they would have to create patterns unique to their own people and place, a style distinct enough to be called “Oneida beadwork.”

“We in our nations in New York State, we know what each other does,” Hill told the Oneida beaders. “We’re all aware the Mohawks have their way of beading, and the Tuscarora have their way of beading; the Onondaga have their way of beading; and the Seneca have their way of beading. We know this. It’s history to us. We have that respect among each other so that when we see each other we know where [we are] from.”

The Oneida beaders are taking up the challenge of creating that singular communal aesthetic identity. The current beaders are looking to a future in which Oneida youth grow up with a raised beadwork style that is distinctively Wisconsin Oneida.

They want this to become a permanent element of Oneida cultural practice.

“It’s really important for me to keep this going,” says Laura Manthe. “That’s why I teach the kids [beading] at the school.”

They see this goal taking shape as young people join the beading circle. All three beading circle hosts—Betty Willems,

Loretta Webster, and Karen Ann Hoffman—speak with delight of the young beaders they have taught, supported, and welcomed to the beading table.

“You see it in the community all over; it’s everywhere,” observes Christine Klimmek, a beader and program coordinator for the Oneida Nation Art Program. With public art projects such as a raised-bead quilt and a cape on display in public buildings across the reservation, raised beadwork is weaving itself through the very community. Oneida dancers perform in powwow regalia adorned with dramatic raised beadwork, making their tribal affiliation instantly recognizable.

The enthusiastic work of the circle in Oneida is changing the face of the reservation, assuring that today’s youth will inherit raised Iroquois beadwork as part of their visual cultural legacy.

“We’re creating our own history, “adapting this medium to our lives,” says Klimmek. Z

Many thanks to beaders interviewed during the course of developing this article and the James Watrous Gallery exhibition, Beading Culture: Raised Beadwork and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Appreciation goes to the individuals who provided editorial assistance with this article, especially Beth Bashara, Sherrole Benton, Jody Clowes, Karen Ann Hoffman, and Loretta Webster, and to those not mentioned in the article whose reflections and artistic practice contributed to our work: Coral Cook, Rodrick Elm, Robin John, April Lindala, Stephanie Sikorowski.

CONNECT: Coming to the James Watrous Gallery Beading Culture: Raised Beadwork and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin On view September 16–November 6, 2016 Beading Culture: Raised Beadwork and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin features the work of Wisconsin Oneida artists dedicated to the survival of one of their most important artistic traditions: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) raised beadwork. Including examples of early raised beadwork, pieces by mentors and teachers, and video of beading circles, this exhibition tells a complex story of artistic excellence, cultural resilience, and the role of art in defining community. Developed in partnership with the Oneida Nation Arts Program and the Oneida Nation Museum, the Beading Culture exhibition and the following related events are free and open to the public: •

Artist's Reception: Saturday, September 24, 1–3:00 pm

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Art at Noon Tour: Friday, October 28, 12–12:30 pm

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Traditional Arts Panel: November 5, 1–3:00 pm

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more details.

Beadwork robin by Rod Elm

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ST PLACE

Fiction CONTEST WINNER

Wisconsin People & Ideas

2016 Fiction Contest

OPEN HOUSE

BY ALLISON SLAVICK

T

here was no dew, so she could work without the discomfort of grass clippings stuck to wet bare feet. Ken had always said that dry grass in the morning meant there’d be an afternoon thunderstorm.

He was often right about things like that, rural folklore that he learned from magazines or neighbors at the working farms along the road. But already she could see the storm front low in the sky to the west. I’ll tell her when the rain starts, she thought. When I feel the first cold drops.

Diane set the potted plant in the grass and looked across the field at the split

level going up at the edge of the woodlot down the road. She’d planned to move the butterfly weed that grew along the fence line, but the machinery had arrived and dug the foundation before she’d found the time. She wondered how long before the field was filled with such houses and the daisies and goldenrod would disappear when the mounds of subsoil were spread on top of the good

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top soil. She’d learned something about topsoil in her twenty years on the farm, and weather patterns, too.

She tipped the pot on its side, supporting the trellis with one hand, and lowered it to the grass. Knowing of her love of plants, some people sent decorative combinations to the funeral, arranged to look like diminutive tropical forests sprouting from baskets, with

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{ Book Reviews } no sense of irony, and when the plants turned yellow Diane transplanted them to separate pots to accommodate their horticultural needs.

She’d tossed out most of the blooming plants, the chrysanthemums and azaleas, but this philodendron had been growing up the trellis for two years. Searching among the leaves, she found a growing tip and unwound the vine from the thin strip of cedar until she freed the entire length, which she stretched out on the grass at an angle from the base.

Not long after Ken and Diane bought the farmhouse Diane converted the glassed-in porch to a solarium, and hung spider plants in the windows and misted ferns with a spray bottle of water. When she saw a wholesaler set up a display on a grassy strip in front of the gas station at the entrance to the interstate, she stopped and looked at each plant before she purchased a Dracaena with multicolored leaves and a staghorn fern. In this way she filled the room, and on warm days the porch smelled like the earth of the tilled fields to the north of the farm.

Mary Jane didn’t want plants in her room, even when Diane offered her a choice of anything on the porch, including the jade plant and the African violets. She looked up at Mary Jane’s curtained window. Her room, on the east end of the house above the porch, heated up in the sun. Mary Jane met her curfew the night before, which Diane set two hours later because it was graduation night, but that little bedroom always got too hot in the morning. She’ll be down here before the rain, she thought. Please let her wake up before the rain.

When they first moved in the farm had a backhouse by a cluster of lilacs at the edge of the field, and a hand pump in the kitchen. After three years they were able to add indoor plumbing, but they hadn’t done anything about insulating the walls. Mary Jane’s room was as cold in winter as it was hot in the spring and summer. Ken thought their children—all children—should be able to tough it out and he suspected them of faking ordinary discomforts and even illnesses. “Let them get up earlier,” he said. “Let them

Earth as It Is in Heaven: An Aural Novel

By Karl Elder Reviewed by Michael Kriesel 256 pages, $10.00, Pebblebrook Press A parable of religious mysticism that’s part love story and part mystery, with a touch of rural hijinks, Karl Elder’s new novel is a welcome addition to the list of titles from one of Wisconsin’s top poets.

The Jacob and Lucile Fessler Professor of Creative Writing and Poet in Residence at Lakeland College, Elder has received national recognition for his unique and highly skilled achievements in complex poetic forms. His first novel displays the same experimental streak as his poems and shares a similar metaphysical bent.

Written in first-person narrative, Earth as It Is in Heaven: An Aural Novel chronicles the religious evolution of Charles “Stick” Cousins, as cultivated by the woman who is his teacher and spiritual mentor, Luda Corvus. The revelatory energy and pace of the novel work to make the reader an accomplice/ witness to the miracles that gradually accumulate, leading to transformations in Cousins, Corvus, the town, and potentially the reader.

The novel is written in a dialect of Elder’s invention, which could have been a huge distraction. While familiar enough for the average reader to understand, it took me the first twenty pages to adjust to the speech patterns. As an aural novel in which the sound of the language is emphasized, the rhythm of the dialogue is as important as the plot.

Here one of the locals swears Cousins to secrecy before revealing a secluded beaver dam inhabited by dream-like creatures no one else can see: “Old Cro-Magnon Man, he stops real sudden-like and he turns to me. He looks me square in the eye. He says, ‘They say you ain’t told a lie in your life, Stick.’

“Well, I sure never heared that. And ifing they was voting—whoever ‘they’ is—I s’pose I’d’ve elected to stay home on account of I never known what the truth is most times.”

Elder’s storyline itself seems almost subservient to the evolution of character enlightenment occurring throughout the book, existing at times only to serve the novel’s concept of transcendence.

“Stick” Cousins’ guileless transparency of character ultimately makes him the perfect witness to and innocent collaborator with Luda Corvus’ evolution of self into selfless, and the transformation of their small town’s patch of earth into “earth as it is in heaven.”

With references to early TV, pocket transistor radios, and a “new” restaurant called McDonald’s, the setting is a small town during the 1950s. Yet it feels like rural 1920s, conjuring 1950s noir novelist Jim Thompson’s tale of dustbowl Oklahoma, Cropper’s Cabin, and the poetic short novels of Richard Brautigan, which are spiritual, surreal, imagistic, whimsical and at times gentle.

Much of Elder’s poetry is minimalist, stripping the world down to a few objects that symbolize another world behind that which the objects inhabit.

It’s a technique Elder handles well in his poems, and he uses it to advantage

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allison Slavick lives near Cable, Wisconsin, where she works as a consultant to nonprofit organizations. She is a mountain bike and cross country ski racer and berry picker. Her short fiction was a previous winner of the Wisconsin Academy’s fiction contest, has been published in Storyglossia, and won the H.E. Francis/Ruth Hindman Foundation Short Story Contest. She is working on a novel that involves duck hunting, activist nuns, and the Italian inventor Giulio Camillo.

JUDGE'S NOTES

By BJ Hollars: In this quiet, understated story, the author explores a family shredded by the dual traumas of death and disappearance. In less capable hands, “Open House” has the makings of a melodrama.

But it comes to a perfectly slow simmer, percolating so unobtrusively that by the time it reaches its crescendo the reader has no choice but to shoulder the full burden of the characters’ grief. Meticulously written and wholly felt.

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put on an extra blanket, wear long underwear to bed.”

But they’d achieved what they’d dreamed of for their children. Kenny Junior had toughed it out, and was sullen and resentful only through his early teens, exuberant about leaving home as he got older. Mary Jane could be defiant and what Ken called mouthy, but Diane was proud of her when she spoke up.

Trying to undo the damage now was like picking at a scab. Little bits of hardness came off around the edges and revealed sensitive pink skin. If she pried too much or got too close to the center a drop of blood came out. But scab was one of those words her own mother had told her an educated person should never use, like lousy or snuck.

She found another end of the vine and followed it down the trellis to where it branched. She let that piece hang and followed the fork up to the top and unwound that one too, holding the Y-shaped stem while she loosened the rest of it. If a piece broke off she could root it in a jar of water and pot up a second plant, but there was no time for that now. Her new place might not have much room, or even sunny windows.

But she was careful with the plant even though she viewed it as common and somewhat weedy; it didn’t have the allure of the slower growing and perfectleaved orchids and bromeliads she collected. Visitors often commented on the size of the philodendron, and the plant had only one week to reorient itself to the sun on the trellis before Mary Jane’s party next weekend.

At the graduation ceremony the day before Mary Jane walked smiling across the stage and pumped the hand of the principal and superintendent and later stood with a group of her classmates, recipients of full scholarships. Mary Jane had chosen Iowa State, which she pointed out to Diane was far enough away that she wouldn’t be coming home for weekends. Maybe she’d come for Christmas, or if she was lucky she’d join a classmate from southern California or Florida for the holidays and avoid the Michigan winter altogether.

The farmhouse’s wooden back door, with its sagging and patched copper

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screen, had hinges that creaked and it slammed shut on its own. These clichés of rural life made Diane laugh out loud whenever she heard them, and they did now, too, when Mary Jane came out with a plastic bowl mounded with dry colorful cereal and sat on the top concrete step and raised her face to the sun. She’d seen her sit there a thousand times, with her cereal, with the cat, with a book. Mary Jane rubbed her bare feet back and forth on the concrete and picked up one piece of cereal and placed it on her tongue.

Diane could see her red fingernail polish. “ G ood m or ni ng, gr adu a t e ,” D i a n e called.

“Good morning, Mermaid.”

Mermaid was Diane’s nickname. Kenny Jr. had started using it when he became too shy about the intimacy of calling Diane Mommy or even Mom during his adolescence. Mary Jane started using it after Kenny Jr.’s death and some of her friends called Diane Mrs. Mermaid and Mary Jane Minnow.

“Feet hurt?”

“Too much walking on high heels,” Mary Jane said.

“Have a nice time otherwise?” Diane asked.

Mary Jane was her class’s valedictorian and following her peppy speech in the afternoon to her classmates and the audience of parents and grandparents, she made the rounds to parties at her classmates’ homes and then to a dance at a United Auto Workers hall rented by the parents of her best friend Kelly. On the coming weekend there would be more parties in the daytime, including Mary Jane’s. The daytime parties were open to all her classmates and their parents.

Mary Jane’s was to be a picnic on the lawn, with volleyball games, but Diane was readying the house for the traipse of girls to the bathroom and parents to the kitchen to help with food preparation and cleanup.

“Mmmm hmmm,” said Mary Jane. She stood and came to where Diane was working and sat in the grass next to the philodendron. She scooped up a handful of cereal, tipped her head back, and let the cereal cascade into her open mouth.

Mary Jane was not small like a minnow.

Diane had learned how to fish, and to

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{ Book Reviews } identify the different kinds, on their vacations to a state park near Lake Michigan.

Diane was the petite one. Mary Jane was more like a pike, she thought, with her father’s bones and lank.

Ken had been nuts about fishing. Once the children were old enough to camp they had joined the masses of families in southern Michigan on weekend trips, to northern cabins and campgrounds where they fished all day and sat around a dirty campfire and cooked food on sticks in the evening. She wondered if there were other states with this kind of weekly exodus or if it was particular to the blue collar workers of southern Michigan. Growing up in Washington DC, she and her parents vacationed on the Chesapeake, a short drive to the east, where they stayed in a clean white cabin with nice linens and dishes.

Mary Jane stretched her legs out on the grass and rested backward on her hands. She and Kenny Jr. had their father’s athleticism, too, and Diane’s favorite photo of Mary Jane showed her jumping high at the volleyball net, spiking the ball to the other side. Her pony tail was above her head and her mouth was open in a surprised scream yet it was clear that every cell of her being was focused on the moment of returning the ball with perfect form and grace and also with the intent of winning even at the expense of kindness. Was she projecting that onto Mary Jane? The family therapist they saw together for their first year alone suggested she was.

Mary Jane wasn’t as timid as Diane, and sometimes that made Diane resentful.

But Diane often saw hesitation in Mary Jane’s eyes and recognized it as her own.

In the angle of her face she glimpsed how she herself looked twenty-five years ago and she, Diane, was fearful they were caught in a cycle, no, a lineage, that she couldn’t stop, especially after what happened to Kenny Jr. The heart-shaped leaves of the philodendron, spread out like a fan and nestled among the linear blades of grass and dandelions made a complicated pattern. Diane lugged the hose from the side of the garage and sprayed the plant and brushed at her nose as dust blew up from the leaves.

here in Earth as It Is in Heaven. Like his complex and masterful poems, Karl Elder’s first foray into fiction deserves attention.

Violet Hours

By Jeanie Tomasko Reviewed by Karla Huston 40 pages, $13:00, Taraxia Press Meet Violet, the eccentric child birthed by Madison poet Jeanie Tomasko and delivered into the world by new Wisconsin publisher Taraxia Press. Tomasko’s Violet Hours is collection of poetry crafted as a sweet gift, a small, hand-stitched book with a French wrap cover and violet flyleaf. The cover art is of a sedate teacup and sugar bowl with a partial skull, waiting like a treat, next to it, a warning, perhaps, of what is to come.

She is a precocious child, filled with the desire for magic, a child’s need to know, to wonder. “They say I was born in a cold spring, the morning/after my mother put up twelve pints of violet jam.”

Violet investigates the things many of us (and most little girls) try to avoid: chicken hearts, the interior of a Bleeding Heart flower, and cicadas. In one poem, she hosts a strange birthday party where guests cut insect shapes out of cellophane. In another, Violet decorates paper dolls with beetle wings, makes a bra from old bullet casings, a briefcase made from one of her scabs.

In yet another, she strings together the bodies of dried Daddy Longlegs, as if to make a necklace.

Violet’s peculiarities unfold in a series of traditional, free-verse, and, most often, prose poems. These poems may give readers the creepy crawlies, but that’s the poet’s intent. Perhaps, what makes us uncomfortable is the thing to which we must attend.

In spite of the character’s “purplish” name, Tomasko focuses much of her imagery on the color red, from blood-rusty saws to blood collected at a birthday party to a raspberry-themed party where spiders crawl over the berries.

Violet Hours concentrates, too, on the trope of hearts, whether they are the ones Violet’s father taught her to cut and deliver to neighbors on Valentine’s Day or the ones she saves when her father makes chicken for supper. Violet’s curious heart beats through these poems, as well.

When Violet creates her Valentine hearts, she cuts a small tail on the top, calls it the “superior vena cava.” In “Bleeding Hearts,” she wonders why her father had never “told her the real shape of the heart.” Does a heart— whether static on paper or live and pulsing—change shape with the act of growing up from child to adult?

When Violet was small her grandmother showed her how to take apart bleeding heart flowers … how the outer petals looked like swans, the tiny stamens: earrings; the pistil, a bottle of champagne and the delicate inner petals, a pair of skates. …

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“Phew. It’s good to get rid of this dust.”

Mary Jane crawled backward like a crab, away from the mist of the hose, with the cereal bowl resting on her stomach and again tipped her face to the sun. Then she licked her fingers and touched each to the cereal and ate the pieces one-by-one from her fingertips.

Diane opened a box of leaf polish and threw aside the box. She shook the bottle. The dauber attached to the cap was milky blue. She kneeled next to the plant and lifted a leaf and spread the polish. It pooled with the water droplets, and Diane used her finger to push the liquid to the edges.

“Only six billion to go,” Mary Jane said. “That looks officially boring and pointless.”

“You’re right,” Diane said. “It is, and that’s a typical teenage thing to say.

I think you officially became an adult yesterday. And I just officially decided not to polish the leaves.” She kept her voice light and playful, and set the bottle in the grass and worked her fingers into the mass of white roots, still compressed in the shape of the pot. The soil fell away and she slid the roots into the overturned pot and opened a plastic bag of potting soil.

“Would you help me put this back together?” She looked at the sky and rubbed at the mist of water on her arm with her wrist. She wanted to feel the raindrops when they started, to get what she wanted to tell Mary Jane out of the way.

She turned the pot upright while Mary Jane scooted closer and held the trellis and tugged on the vines to draw them closer. Diane positioned the roots in the pot and poured soil around them, pushing it around with one hand while she gripped the bag at an angle between her knees, encouraging the soil to flow with punches at the bag.

“What does this remind you of?” she asked Mary Jane.

Mary Jane giggled. “Can’t you dig some god damn black dirt from the woods?”

She spoke in a low voice. “What a god damn waste of money.”

Diane laughed and moved her head from side to side as she said, “And you’d get some god damn worms in it.”

Thunder rumbled in the west. Mary Jane spun on her bottom and faced the clouds. “Oh goody, a storm,” she said.

She lay on her back and stretched her arms and legs.

It no longer felt wrong to mock Ken. Diane was embarrassed by how quickly her grieving subsided, the second round of grieving coming so soon after the first, and surprised, when she remembered their young love, by how she could no longer

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She was embarrassed by how quickly her grieving subsided, the second round of grieving coming so soon after the first, and surprised, when she remembered their young love, by how she could no longer identify what had attracted her to him in the first place. identify what had attracted her to him in the first place. Ken had gone right after Kenny Jr.’s funeral, right from the funeral.

She hadn’t known he’d filled the car’s trunk with his clothing and fishing tackle, and while the undertaker was driving her and Mary Jane back to the funeral home in the shiny black limo, where they gathered the baskets of plants they wanted to keep and were loading them into her sister’s car, Ken was withdrawing what was left of their savings after the funeral expenses. With her sister’s car filled with plants, when it became clear that Ken wasn’t coming back, the funeral director had driven them home.

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How could you know so little of someone after twenty years? She’d wondered that daily for the first six months, until she received the divorce papers from a lawyer in Costa Rica, where Ken had gone after the accident.

In the same envelope was the deed to the house, notarized and signed over to her. She didn’t know he’d taken that, too, but at least he’d had the decency, the common courtesy, she thought, to let her have the farm. She’d included a note when she returned the papers. She’d told Ken that they missed him, that there was another new house going up at the edge of the field, and that Mary Jane was doing well in school. Mary Jane had withdrawn after that and she let her do so for a while. But she’d gone willingly to the counselor and the relief they both experienced with the plain talk felt good.

Why couldn’t they continue that at home, without the counselor’s guidance? Maybe it was Mary Jane’s age, she thought, and her shyness. She could see that wearing away with each milestone in her life.

She’d sent another note to the Costa Rican attorney’s office the following fall to tell Ken about Mary Jane’s scholarship, and another when she was selected as valedictorian.

Diane looked at the mailbox, leaning on its round post at the end of the driveway.

Mail had become an event in her life. She expected her own college transcripts today, to include with her application, and the realtor said she’d send a how-to packet for staging the house. Mary Jane loved to get the mail, and used the trek down the long driveway as training for volley ball, leaping over the depressions that filled with muddy water in the spring. She’d need to think of a reason to beat her to it. But if the rain came first, it wouldn’t matter. She’d keep her promise to herself and tell her when the rain started.

Ken had taken Kenny Jr. on a guided bone fishing trip in Costa Rica for his 18th birthday, right after his graduation, when she’d gone through similar preparations for a party. Kenny Jr. had sent a postcard with a colorful postage stamp of tropical plants that she knew he’d chosen just for her. She kept the card in a box on her dresser. His left-slanting

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{ Book Reviews } handwriting, so boyish and tight, told of his ride on something he called a Tarzan swing, and of walking along a suspension bridge where he saw monkeys and parrots. He’d listed on the bottom the scientific names of the tropical trees he’d learned. But he hadn’t come back to enroll in the botany program at the state university or to start his summer job at the lumber yard.

Once they got to Tortuguero, Ken had forgone the expensive charter they’d talked about and hired another boat, a smaller boat with unlicensed guides, not the best guides according to what she could glean from the police report.

Kenny Jr., a non-swimmer, had fallen off the platform on the back of the boat. Not that swimming lessons would have saved him, she told herself over and over. For a few days her imagination let her see Ken with a beer in one hand, waving his other hand while he boasted of all the fish he’d caught on chartered trips in Lake Michigan. But the police told her otherwise, that the guides had to restrain Ken from jumping over when they saw Kenny Jr.’s cap floating on the flat water far behind the boat as they sped along to a more productive reef. And that Ken jumped in next to Kenny’s body and performed CPR long after it was clear that Kenny was dead. And that Ken lay on the floor of the cabin with his arm across his son for the long ride back to the marina.

From where she stood, she could see the mail carrier turn off the state highway a quarter mile away and begin his stops at the mailboxes along the road. She finished pressing the soil around the roots and shook the pot. She stood and brushed at the philodendron’s leaves. It would look good for the party; maybe one of the guests would take it home. Mary Jane was on her back, one hand playing with the cereal in the bowl and the other twirling a dandelion flower under her chin. Thunder cracked overhead and they both shrieked. The sky opened and what fell was not rain, but hail. Z

Violet prepared a demonstration of the Bleeding Heart Legend for her class project. She had enough hearts for each classmate and the teacher. …

The kids thought it was cool that their hearts had real blood Violet had injected prior to class.

However Violet might be defined—a strange child living in a world of imagination or a bug-obsessed girl and future entomologist or a psychotic possible serial killer—she will likely steal your heart.

The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay

By Kelly Harms Reviewed by Monette Bebow-Reinhard 288 pages, $25.99, Thomas Dunne Books Lily Stewart is an artist whose life is on the brink of collapse. Her credit cards are maxed out, her so-called boyfriend takes advantage of her, her old car has run out of oil, and, to top it all off, she’s being evicted from her New York City apartment. In dire straits begins the newest novel from author Kelly Harms, a former literary agent from the Big Apple who has made Madison, Wisconsin, her adopted home.

While The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay begins in New York, most of the action takes place in a fictional northern Wisconsin resort town. Lily heads off to Minnow Bay in the quest for self-improvement—and for an annulment of the drunken quickie marriage she made ten years earlier. While the idea of “forgetting” that you married someone ten years ago seems a little far-fetched, Lily pulls it off by being … what’s the word … delightfully daft, and Harms cultivates this in order to establish a growth pattern for Lily. Once Lily finds the document of annulment that she never signed, memories of husband Ben Hutchinson come flooding back—as do memories of her friendship with Renee, a college friend who chose a far different path than Lily.

Lily finds the former tech guru Hutchison living the life of a hermit in his hometown, and the novel slowly unravels their reasons for separation.

Of course, they are still attracted to each other. But there is something preventing them from connecting, and distrust—probably the most dominant element in the novel—runs roughshod over all of Lily’s relationships.

In the cold January isolation of Minnow Bay, Lily finds her artistic talent realized, and new friendships poking through the snow. Her new friends expect Lily to stay and fall in love with the man she’s supposed to divorce, and this further complicates the idea of who she should trust. There is a lot of humanity in these pages, and Harms’ characters have wonderful (often pithy) insights about life, such as “when things seem too good to be true, they usually are,” and “like how you can be discontented and happy at the same time, somehow?”

The book is not without flaws. For instance, Lily’s lack of rational thinking is too easily explained away by her daftness. In part, The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay runs a predictable course. But the ending is anything but predictable, and, for me, this is the sign of a well-written book. The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay is certainly not just another romance novel, and it deserves a place on your summer beach reading list.

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poetry contest

winners

Winner of the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2016 Prize in Poetry: In the Science Museum In a room near Triceratops, not far from the elephant skull and the wave machine we come upon a glass case with shelves of women’s shoes. My daughter and I peer in not expecting this, a relic of pre-World War II displays.

Shoes are freckled, with intricate embroidery and beadwork.

We are momentarily dazzled. Elizabethan shoes brush against New World moccasins, and above and below shoes from Japan and China line up, a medley of footwear. “Those are certainly for children,” my daughter says, spotting a set with sharply pointed toes thin as praying hands. I bend down, looking at the tag, confirming China, which I tell her, adding simply, “Those are women’s shoes.”

“No,” she says, “too tiny.” At almost eight, logic and observation are working well for her. I tell her again: “They’re women’s shoes.”

How to explain foot binding with some of the shock, but not all?

“A long while back in China mothers tightly wrapped their daughters’ feet to keep them tiny.” My daughter listens, then says, “But why?” “Small feet were considered beautiful,” I tell her.

“But it did make it really hard to walk.”

“Why?” my daughter frowns. “Why would they do that?”

“The men wanted women close to home. If you can’t walk well, you can’t go places. They don’t do that to feet any more, though.”

My daughter sets her lips tight, staring at the shoes. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. That is just plain mean.”

She comes from the land that first used silk for clothes, that invented paper and printing, then put them together into books, that had eaten noodles for centuries and sent them back to Italy with Marco Polo. The list is long of what we can celebrate.

Foot binding is different. I don’t tell her about the bones breaking because the wrapping was so tight, the feet beginning to decompose. That will come later, along with her wonder about why so many girls are abandoned, making the orphanage a world of women, making every one of the stuffed animals in her menagerie at home not a he, every elephant, every bear—a she.

—Karen Loeb, Eau Claire 50

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ABOUT THE POET

Karen Loeb grew up in Chicago, and has lived in Wisconsin since 1988. In 2008 her daughter, she, and her husband went back to China, their daughte r’ s bi r t h p la ce , for a n extended stay. Her poetry has appeared recently in The New Ohio Review, The Cape Rock, Hanging Loose and elsewhere. Five other poems about China and adoption were published in the anthology Shifting Balance Sheets from Wising Up Press. Loeb’s fiction has appeared widely in magazines, and has won a Minnesota Voices Project Award (for her collection Jump Rope Queen). In 2014 “The Walk to Makino” won the Wisconsin People and Ideas Fiction Contest, and “Cantaloupe” won an Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Stories of hers have won PEN Syndicated Fiction Prizes, and she is a past recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Loeb teaches creative writing at UW–Eau Claire, where she is a professor emerita.

us n o B oem P

Bakers My mother wasn’t a baker in the ordinary sense. No three-tiered cakes with strawberries marching the frosty perimeters.

No éclairs sliding from the oven for treats on Sundays. Sure, once in a while she measured out flour. Both of us in aprons with rickrack on the pockets, we kneaded the dough on the kitchen counter rolling it out on a wooden board coated with more flour, as we attempted a pie, or punched out stars and hearts and crescents for cookies. But mostly we relied on the bakery two blocks away where bread in white paper bags and sugar cookies sparkling on plates were good enough.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Kimberly Blaeser: “In the Science Museum” poem rewards the reader in many ways. Ostensibly about the practice of foot binding, the poem’s reach is much broader. Weaving a narrative from both the adult’s and the child’s perspective, it succinctly suggests the complicated reality of cultural history—that of others and of our own.

The poem successfully blurs the boundary between the “spectacle” of collected objects and the everyday “menagerie” of the personal, leaving the reader simultaneously more enlightened and aware of lurking and unexamined conflicts. On the level of language, it offers us lovely images such as those of shoes “freckled, with intricate embroidery and beadwork” and shoes with “sharply pointed toes / thin as praying hands.” Like the mother in the poem, the poet offers us beauty and only as much truth as we can stand.

Instead, another oven sat like one turret of a castle in the corner of the kitchen. Round and built by her of firebrick, my mother also wired it herself. “How big is it?” someone might ask. My mother would smile, hold one hand far from another, say, “Big enough to fire a vase this tall.”

She and I often sat at the kitchen table rolling gray clay, dampening it with a real sea sponge, pressing out pots and vases and bowls. It was no secret what went on in our kitchen, but it felt like one.

—Karen Loeb, Eau Claire

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Second-Place Prize in Poetry: Nighthawks Edward Hopper 1942

ABOUT THE POET

Art Institute, Chicago

He sits at the counter of the café, keeps his hat on, a grey fedora, maybe thinking he won’t stay long.

Janet Leahy’s poems appear in online and print journ als inclu d ing N e w Verse News, Midwest Prairie Review, The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, and elsewhere. She has two collections of poetry, The Storm: Poems of War, Iraq (2004), and Not My Mother’s Classroom (Poetry People Press, 2012). She regularly attends the Key West and Dodge Poetry Festivals, and loves the summer experience at American Players Theatre in Spring Green.

His back to us he faces the couple who come every night to sit at the bend of the counter.

The woman in red … hair, dress, lipstick, her companion in suit and tie, they take no note of him, murmur only to each other.

The server, white shirt, white hat, blond and young eyes fixed on the woman of the night.

JUDGE'S NOTES

The man has grown tired of this scene his coffee bitter, body stiff from sitting too long on the stool, he wants to step out of the picture.

By Kimberly Blaeser: Through this playful ekphrastic poem, the poet explores t h e porou s na tu res of art and reality. We are invited to imagine the scene of Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks (1942) and how easily it might mirror the vibrancy of the Michigan Avenue of today’s Chicago.

The poet’s description vividly renders the Hopper painting and whimsically depicts that life spilling over into ours. Imagination, the poet suggests, makes of art a swinging door, with the figures and ideas entering our reality; and as the smart twist in the last stanza suggests, becoming another lens through which we view our own everyday experience.

No one seems to notice as he moves toward the door, exits the frame, dashes down the long tier of steps darts past the lions who stand guard — both fast asleep.

On Michigan Avenue a Starbucks at every corner, livelier than the café Hopper painted for him, he goes inside muses over the menu, orders a cappuccino grande.

The barista says she likes his hat, tells him the fedora reminds her of the man in her favorite painting.

—Janet Leahy, New Berlin

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Poetry Class with Ellen a cento composed of lines from Ellen Kort’s poems

Poems swing from the clothesline strung between earth and sky She wears the soft shawl of sunrise her words like silk running through our fingers an offering a melodic string of pearls in a world that has forgotten how to listen

I whisper Don’t go I can’t remember what the air felt like the first day the frail bridge on which we traveled down the long blue corridor to the rim of sky to the edges of our lives there was something about light it was as if all the fireflies of childhood had come out to play

I whisper Don’t go What kind of agreement did she have with the earth with the woodpecker’s stuttered alphabet the bear and deer bending to drink from the lake the rain varnishing stones making everything wet and tender There is nothing left between us now but an empty sky humming with the silver fabric of her poems.

In loving memory Ellen Kort, 3/26/36–4/21/15 First Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2000—2004

—Janet Leahy, New Berlin

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ABOUT THE POET

N a n c y B a u e r -K i n g is a retired United Methodist clergywoman who wrote sermons for 25 years.

A life-long resident of Wisconsin, BauerKing has lived much of her long life in the southern part of the state. Both sets of her grandparents were farmers, and, though their farms have succumbed to a strip mall and an ethanol plant, Bauer-King retains her formative rural values. Today she is enjoying exploring genres beyond the sermonic, and is grateful for the encouragement and resources of Red Oak Studio in West Allis in this exploration.

Third-Place Prize in Poetry: Head Cheese In dim light Grandma sits at her table shaving fat and flesh from the pig’s skull swick swick swick her knife slices through bristled skin past cartilage and brain she’ll press meat into a jellied loaf.

The body hacksawed in half cut gristle, bone and blood lies cold and splayed in Grandma’s storeroom. waiting to be severed snipped and cooked for suppers.

JUDGE'S NOTES

By Kimberly Blaeser: Using a smartly conceived parallel structure, the poet responsible for “Head Cheese” successfully transforms the supposed grotesque, making of it a homey image. Vividly rendered are the gruesome images of grandmother’s culinary butchery of the pig. This, we are to understand, is the real and not the more romantic popular rendering of old world domesticity. But on the heels of the graphic making of head cheese, comes the loving interaction between the child and the grandmother.

The same hand that deftly cuts—“swick swick swick”—through the pig, now playfully tweaks—“flick flick flick”—the toes of the child. The last line of the poem subsumes the two scenes into the same era of practical survival: the soft pillow on which the child will lay its head is also product of hard reality, made as it is from the feathers of another domestic animal.

We can take from the poem the several memorable images or use those as the poet invites—to assume an unflinching vision of our true reality.

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At bedtime Grandma reaches for my foot flick flick flick she tweaks my row of toes Tom Bumble Penny Lou Louie Whistle Maya Hassa …

Grandma holds my little piggy waits for me to shriek Pick-a-dee-dee!

I giggle and lay my head on feather pillow.

—Nancy Bauer-King, Racine

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Divorce Day Afraid I will fall in love again with his honey-colored wisps of hair and sturdy sinewed arms I wear a new red dress a fiery shield from regret Then driving to the courthouse I hear today marks the 50th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster when spark burst helium into flame dirigible crumpled to the ground Life Magazine cover May 6, 1937 kindled horror in my childhood. men caught mid-air hurtling to death burned skins of flesh and fabric I see him smoking in the hallway amid the ashes of our marriage he wears a soot black suit I sign papers with no lament jump ship before the judge. —Nancy Bauer-King, Racine

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Snapshot Wisconsin Gallery Talk

Cultivating Creative Economies

Thursday, August 18, 12–1:00 pm James Watrous Gallery, 3rd Fl., Overture Center, 201 State Street, Madison

Tuesday, September 20, 7–8:30 pm Wisconsin Studio, 3rd Fl., Overture Center, 201 State Street, Madison

Snapshot Wisconsin, a collaboration between UW– Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), is a statewide effort to monitor our wildlife with a network of over 500 trail cameras. The project’s goal is to inform management decisions at the DNR and include the public in this process. Please join us during painter Valerie Mangion’s Night Vision exhibition for a gallery talk with Jennifer Stenglein, the project leader for Snapshot Wisconsin, to learn about the process, impacts, and potential future of this exciting collaboration.

How can creativity help diversity our economic portfolio in Wisconsin? Please join us for a discussion on creative economies with Sheila M. Smith, executive director of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts. This is the first of a series of talks in the Academy’s Wisconsin Creativity Initiative, a new effort exploring how specific investments in the knowledge economy and our creative sectors can make a brighter future for Wisconsin. In partnership with the Wisconsin Arts Board, Arts Wisconsin, and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, the Wisconsin Academy is finding and examining the elements of a creative economy that make the most sense for Wisconsin, and the ways we can harness these elements to make our communities and our state stronger.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Leslie Iwai: Daughter Cells On view November 18, 2016 – January 22, 2017 Opening reception on Friday, December 2, 5:30–7:30 pm, with a talk by the artist and Dr. Mark Burkard

Installation artist Leslie Iwai (Madison) is fascinated by the mystery of cytofission, a form of cellular division that occurs when a cell is under duress and cannot divide normally.

Daughter Cells, a project created by Iwai in collaboration with University of Wisconsin– Madison cancer researcher Dr. Mark Burkard, explores cytofission through an inter-related series of drawings, fiber-based sculptures, photo-micrographs, and text. This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public.

Left: Leslie Iwai, from the installation Daughter Cells, 2016.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details