Wisconsin People & Ideas - Summer 2017

Fighting the Formidable Flying Foe Mosquito research in Wisconsin

The Nature of Art Bioinspired artist Peter Krsko

Mayana Chocolate • Freedom Riders • Grimm & Litherland Pizza Farms • Girls Cross Country • Writing Contest Winners

FASHION

a STATE of

The Roddis Collection: American Style and Spirit Florence Eiseman: Designing Childhood for the American Century Contemporary Threads: Wisconsin Fashion Daniel Arnold: A Paparazzo for Strangers

JUNE 11–SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 wisconsinart.org | West Bend Dress, Cotton/rayon, shirred beaver, metal belt, c. 1934 From the collections of The Henry Ford Museum, photo by Gillian Bostock Ewing, copyright Jane Bradbury

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

Editor’s Note Caleb Whitney has thick forearms and a grip that could crush a coconut. A landscape gardener and firefighter from Baileys Harbor, Caleb was telling me about how he just got engaged to his girlfriend, Kristen Peil, and that his landscape business, Green Side Up, was really taking off.

I learned all this, and felt Caleb's powerful handshake, in the small-talk moments before we began our fiction and poetry contest winners’ reading at the 2009 Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison.

Caleb had won the second-place poetry prize for his poem, “Kiehnau’s Service Station (since 1952) Fire—Spring 1996.” As we stood talking in the nonfiction aisle of Avol’s Bookstore, I also learned that Caleb, who was about to read his poem to an audience of fifty people, had never read to anyone before—and that he was extremely nervous.

When it was Caleb’s turn to read, his voice broke a little as he admitted to the audience that it was his first reading. Caleb said he didn’t really think of himself as a poet, but that he was grateful for the award and the opportunity to read his poems, which he then did to a rapt audience.

After the contest readings, the award-winning poets, writers, and a few of their friends joined me at the Plaza Tavern for congratulatory beers. As we began to loosen up and get to know each other over Plazaburgers and pitchers of Capital Amber, it became clear that most of the contest winners had never before read their poems or stories to an audience. Over the course of the evening, each in his or her own way mentioned how winning the award, receiving prize money, and reading for a group of strangers were experiences they would never forget.

It’s been nine years since my first Wisconsin People & Ideas writing contest experience, and I am so very pleased that we can continue to support Wisconsin writers from all over the state (see page 47). Over the years, a few contest winners have gone on to achieve critical or commercial fame for their work. But almost all, like Caleb Whitney, now consider themselves poets and writers.

TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

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

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

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Bioinspired artist Peter Krsko (Wonewoc), UW–Madison Arts Institute Spring 2017 Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence, stands beneath his Renewal installation at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. Photo by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

SUMMER 2017

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CONTENTS 24

04 From the Director 05 Letters 07 Happenings Wisconsin Table

10 How to Raise a Pizza

Candice Wagener

Report

14 Growing Our Creative Power TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

Anne Katz

Photo Essay

18 All In: Shorewood Girls Cross Country

Lois Bielefeld

Profile

24 The Nature of Art: Peter Krsko

Steven Potter

Robbi Bannen/A to Z Produce & Bakery

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

VOLUME 63 · NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2017

Lois Bielefeld

18 @ the Watrous Gallery

30 Douglas Bosley & Scott Espeseth Fiction

36 Mudstone 1st Place Contest Winner

Bob Wake

Poetry

48 Poems

1st–3rd Place Contest Winners Nicholas Gulig, Hansa Kerman Pistotnik, and Georgia Ressmeyer

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Reviews

54 The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan

Jane Elder

55 Scriptorium, by Melissa Range

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

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

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

Copyright © 2017 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

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

C. Kubasta

JASON A. SMITH editor JEAN LANG copy editor JODY CLOWES arts editor CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

A magazine by and for Wisconsin Subscribe today and get the best of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture delivered to your door four times a year.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/subscribe.

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Amanda E. Schilling

From the Director

W

hen writer and historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “the American Dream” in 1931, the phrase perhaps had more to do with the idealism at the heart of the American experience than simple material prosperity. The American Dream, he wrote in The Epic of America, is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

Even though the American Dream in 2017 has many definitions, that core of idealism, of unlimited potential, persists to this day.

For some, this means visions of prosperity in the form of wealth and access to “the good life.” In reality, that concept of prosperity is often realized as a manageable home mortgage, modest savings account, and steady job. Others dream of an escape from poverty, or of a college education and the promise it holds in terms of health, wealth, and, perhaps, happiness. American citizenship itself can be the ultimate dream, a chance to live in “the land of the free.”

The American Dream to which many of us still cling today was forged in the years after World War II. My dad, like so many veterans, returned to his hometown after his time in the service and got married. Dad got a job as a draftsman for AC Spark Plug (a job he kept for 35 years) that came with medical and dental benefits, vacation time, and a retirement plan. He saved enough money to buy the small lot in the country on which he built our house. My parents raised two children who got a solid education at public school, said the pledge of allegiance, and did their homework.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

My parents lived modestly and, because they were savers, were able to afford my tuition at a four-year state university. Moreover, my parents were also able to retire with a pension, insurance, and some savings, which meant that they could continue to live modestly without fear of encroaching poverty or losing access to health care in their later years.

Today, in 48% of American families, both parents work outside the home. In many cases, it’s because these families need two incomes to make ends meet.

While around 90% of Americans now have some form of health insurance, only 31% have more than $1,000 in savings. This makes retirement an open question for many aging Americans in the work force, especially for those who (like my parents) hope to contribute to the higher education of their children.

It’s important to note that our understanding of what constitutes “American” is shifting as much as our definition of the American Dream. Like most Americans, I’m the descendent of immigrants.

Early in the 20th century, my Scandinavian grandparents came to the United States to pursue the dream of opportunity—and escape poverty and political upheaval in southern Finland. Would these Finnish-American immigrants be welcomed today?

For the Academy’s 2017–2018 season, we’re hosting a series of talks on the ways in which today’s American Dream is both similar to and different from that of previous generations. Held in partnership with WisconsinEye, our six-part American Dream in Wisconsin series will explore the social and economic impacts of immigration, the changing face of rural and urban communities, the role of education and science in creating opportunity, and, perhaps most important, what the future holds for those of us who still believe in an American Dream. For our series we’ll be tapping the wisdom and experience of social scientists, historians, artists, and community leaders from across the state.

Please join us—in person or through Facebook Live—on this journey, as we expect this to be a fascinating and informative series that will be stronger for your participation.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

NEWS for MEMBERS NOMINATE AN ACADEMY FELLOW Do you know a remarkable person in your community who has made significant contributions to the cultural life and welfare of our state and beyond? Help us identify the candidates for our 2018 class of Wisconsin Academy Fellows. You can nominate someone yourself or share this information with others. For more information, visit wisconsinacademy.org/nominate.

YEAR-END THANKS Over the course of the last twelve months we have invited members, friends, and program participants to support our work with a tax-deductible donation. Through your generosity, we reached our annual fundraising goal for 2016–17. Every gift we receive helps us to continue to provide quality programs and publications, like Wisconsin People & Ideas. Thank you!

AMERICAN DREAM SERIES Starting this fall, we are hosting a series of six talks that will explore how changes in public education, rural life, and the immigrant experience are shaping our hopes and dreams for the future. This series, in partnership with WisconsinEye, will be broadcast through Facebook Live. This means you can learn from our array of thoughtful speakers and join the conversation from anywhere in Wisconsin (and beyond). More information about this new series can be found at wisconsinacademy.org/americandreamWI. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Don’t forget: We want to hear from you.

Please send feedback and comments about Academy programs and publications to editor@wisconsinacademy.org.

Letters This May the Wisconsin Academy lost a longtime supporter, former Academy Board member Thomas Pleger. With Tom’s passing, the world also lost a lifelong advocate for the transformative power of higher education, and a man who lived life with a gusto that was beyond amazing.

When I was Campus Executive Officer and Dean of UW–Fox Valley, I hired Tom as an anthropologist. He came to us as a relatively fresh PhD, became a tenure-track assistant professor, and, ultimately, my Associate Dean. It was very unusual for someone untenured to become an administrator. Risky. But Tom wanted to do it, and he did it well. No, spectacularly. We became close friends. Eventually, Tom left UW–Fox Valley to be my CEO/Dean colleague at UW–Baraboo/Sauk County, and then became the first person in the history of the thirteen-campus UW Colleges to ascend to the presidency of a four-year university, Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

For all his intellectual gifts, Tom was the kind of guy who would smile, shake hands, and talk with anyone. He and his wife Teresa were absolute soulmates, and he loved to share pictures of their dogs and African Grey parrot, “the water” (he loved boats), and his LSSU students, who, like me, loved him dearly.

Tom is gone from our daily lives, but he is not gone from our hearts and minds. It’s up to us to carry on the philosophy, honesty, and integrity that Tom was known for and that will never die.

Jim Perry, Larsen Academy Board Member and former Board President

I so appreciate the contests that Wisconsin People & Ideas holds each year. They are a galvanizing force for Wisconsin poets and fiction writers, and I always look forward to reading the prize-winning stories and poems. The generous award, along with the residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for Arts and Crafts has given me a psychological lift and a welcome monetary boost. Only my writing counted while I was in Mineral Point, and that was so nourishing and important. I’m so grateful!

Karen Loeb, Eau Claire

Thank you so much for the Academy’s organization of the wonderful The Art of Discovery talk at Madison’s Overture Center (April 11, 2017). Each of the three speakers gave fantastic introductory talks, weaving individual and very interesting portraits of how science and the creative process are related. The moderator was also superb, one of the best I have seen, and the audience also added to this stellar event with excellent questions and observations. I look forward to attending similar Academy events in the future.

Don Wichert, Madison

SUMMER 2017

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THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN



A series by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

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

The American Dream in Wisconsin is a series of

9/19/17

John Gurda, historian & author of The Making of Milwaukee

public talks presented by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in partnership with

10/17/17

11/4/17

Perspectives on the Dream Terese Agnew, artist Patty Loew, journalist & author of Native People of Wisconsin Jesus Salas, founder of Obreros Unidos

you to join us in a year-long exploration of how changes in public education, rural life, and the immigrant experience are shaping our hopes and

Cultivating the Dream Michael Bell, Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems Sarah Lloyd, Wisconsin Farmers Union

WisconsinEye at the Overture Center for the Arts and online through Facebook Live. We invite

Neighbors & Strangers

2/27/18

Healthcare Access & Reform Donna Friedsam, UW–Madison Population Health Institute

dreams for the future.

3/13/18

The Pursuit of Happiness Richard Davidson, UW–Madison Center for Healthy Minds

4/10/18

Information and advance online registration: wisconsinacademy.org/americandreamWI

Dreams of the Next Generation Michael Johnson, Boys & Girls Club of Madison

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

Series Sponsors

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FOLLOW THIS SERIES AT: #AmericanDreamWI Facebook: /Wisconsin Academy Twitter: @WASAL Instagram: /WatrousGallery WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Happenings

Hoard Historical Museum

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

Pradeep Rohatgi Pradeep Rohatgi (2014), an Academy Fellow and professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, was recently honored with the Award for Scientific Merit by the American Foundry Society for fifty years of significant contributions to the metal-casting industry. Prior to joining UWM in 1986, Rohatgi was director and chief executive officer at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Rohatgi holds eighteen patents, is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and has received many awards for both innovation and public service.

Academy Fellow and environmental historian William Cronon (2006) received the 2017 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award, given jointly by the Society of American Historians and the Roosevelt Institute, for distinguished writing in American history of enduring public significance. A professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at UW–Madison, Cronon is author of Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 1983), Nature’s Metropolis (W.W. Norton, 1991), and the blog Scholar as Citizen, in which he advocates for more academic freedom.

Wisconsin Academy staff and board are saddened to learn of the loss of two Academy Fellows: Sister Joel Read (1985) and Nancy Oestreich Lurie (1987) passed away in Spring 2017. One of the nation’s longest-serving college presidents and a renowned advocate for education reform, Read will be remembered for her contributions to Milwaukee’s Alverno College. An author and anthropologist, Lurie was from 1972 until her retirement in 1993 the North American Indian curator and department head of anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where she volunteered until 2015.

Academy Fellows are the best and brightest our state has to offer. Nominate someone you know at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

D AY This spring, the Wisconsin Legislature approved a resolution that designated May 12, 2017, as Lorine Niedecker Day. Niedecker is a 20thcentury poet from Fort Atkinson known for her vivid imagery, subtle rhythms, and spare language.

Born on May 12, 1903, Niedecker lived on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River for most of her life. Her relative isolation from other writers and the austere beauty of her natural surroundings had a notable impact on her work. Since her death in 1970, critics have identified Niedecker as a significant and original voice in contemporary American poetry. Today, her work and life are highlighted in Fort Atkinson at the Dwight Foster Public Library and the Hoard Historical Museum.

The resolution dedicating Lorine Niedecker Day in Wisconsin was supported by Representative Cody Horlacher (R–Mukwonago) and Senator Stephen Nass (R–LaGrange). The idea came about when Niedecker aficionado Joel Van Haaften and the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and expanding the legacy of Lorine Niedecker, reached out to Horlacher’s office about the possibility of a proclamation recognizing Niedecker’s birthday. Van Haaften, the Friends, Niedecker fans, and poets from across the state are hoping the Legislature will permanently establish an annual May 12 recognition of the Fort Atkinson poet and native.

Jason A. Smith

SUMMER 2017

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Happenings

Journal from the Heartland, a new publication from Blue Bus Publishing in Amherst, offers a unique take on life in Wisconsin by sharing works by emerging and established writers and artists from across the state. The brainchild of Amherst residents David Wright, Eleonore Hebal, and Cyndy Irvine, the journal was established to elevate the work of local writers as well as a forum for mostly local visual artists.

The Spring 2017 inaugural issue leans toward fiction, but also features essays and creative writing on a range of topics.

Denise Brennecke contemplates the lowly cabbage and its place on our table, while Madelin Petz reflects on the iconic Wisconsin barn. Alan Haney, Jim Rollman, and Jeremy Solin share essays on the natural world, and Dennis Chandler and David Wright offer fiction rooted in Wisconsin tradition. Justin Isherwood, Bill Berry, and Tom Jensen offer seasoned perspectives on life in Central Wisconsin, while poetry by Susan Luton, Catfish Stephenson, and Erin Thompson and paintings by Ann Herzog Wright, John Davenport, Jim McKnight, and Randy Clausen round out the journal's offerings.

While the new journal is available at Book World and Kindred Spirit Books in Stevens Point, the Bookcellar in Waupaca, and The Village Hive, Falcon One Stop, and Lettie W. Jensen Community Center in Amherst, editor Eleonore Hebal notes that the first printing is all but sold out. However, plans are underway for issue number two, with the journal accepting submissions online starting July 15 in preparation for a Winter 2018 publication.

In many ways the journal, which receives support from Tomorrow River Chautauqua and CREATE Portage County, is a community-based labor of love. “Every individual contributing has a deep-seated desire to promote and celebrate the power of community and place,” says Wright. “In other words, we love it here in Wisconsin.”

David Wright/Jason A. Smith

Destinee K. Udelhoven

JOURNAL

MUSEUM Wisconsin’s newest cultural center, emphasizing the enduring connection between the unique Driftless Region’s landscape and its residents both past and present, recently opened its doors in downtown Mount Horeb.

The Driftless Historium Museum & Research Center comprises almost an entire city block and incorporates the recently renovated 1880s-era Mount Horeb House, the existing Mount Horeb History Museum, and a Welcome Center nestled between the two (on the former site of the Troll Inn).

Ten years in the making, the facility features a welcoming visitor center, two exhibit galleries, a multipurpose programming room with kitchenette, an environmentally sound artifact and archival storage area, a cozy research and reading room, and enough space to comfortably showcase Mount Horeb Area Historical Society’s collection of 25,000 individual pieces.

The Historium entryway is crowned with a six-foot tall, mixedmetal, hanging sculpture by John Pahlas of Center Ground Studios.

Palas worked closely with Mount Horeb Historical Society staff and volunteers to understand and convey in his work the Historium’s deep and enduring connection between a place and its people.

Permanent exhibits include a 3D virtual replica of the historic Little Norway Building, which was constructed in Trondheim, Norway, for the Norway Pavilion at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Little Norway Building is fine example of Norse stave church architecture, and it was a foundational part of the Little Norway living museum in Blue Mounds before the building was dismantled and shipped back to Norway in 2015. An ethnic art exhibit, housed in the permanent collection is set to open in July 2017. Other items that tell the story of how Mount Horeb became known as the Troll Capital of the World are also on display.

“I believe the best historians are storytellers and the best exhibits tell stories,” says Historium executive director Destinee K. Udelhoven, outlining the museum’s curatorial approach. “We believe it is our job to interpret these artifacts and their stories in a way that allows our visitors to feel connected to—and see themselves in—the past.”

Jason A. Smith

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

with David Doubilet & Jennifer Hayes

STEVE WINTER

CORY RICHARDS

DAVID DOUBILET

Coral Kingdoms and Empires of Ice

On the Trail of the Big Cats

Point of No Return

with Steve Winter

with Hilaree O’Neill

DAVID GUTTENFELDER

We’ve had issues for 40 Years 1976–2016

A Rare Look: North Korea to Cuba with David Guttenfelde

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SUMMER 2017

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Wisconsin Table

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

To

ny

Sch

ultz

/Ston

ey Acres Farm

Wisconsin Table

How to Raise a Pizza

BY CANDICE WAGENER

F

arm-to-table dining is more than a trend. In communities across Wisconsin, people are

demanding more sustainably and locally produced foods—and craving opportunities to learn about how these foods are produced. Some small family farms in Wisconsin are providing a unique (and

Wisconsin Public Television/James Gill

direct) take on farm-to-table by providing idyllic dining experiences inside refurbished barns and on hillsides overlooking active pastureland. While farms of all stripes offer these dining experiences, a specific type of on-farm dining has risen to the top over recent years: the pizza farm.

Kat Becker and Tony Schultz of Stoney Acres Farms in Athens, Wisconsin.

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Wisconsin Table

says Bannen. “That’s just not true anymore because of the lack of the farmers in the landscape.”

Once home to thousands of predominantly small to medium-sized family farms, Wisconsin has seen a marked loss of both farms and farmland over the past decade. Bannen says that even though people are further and further removed from the farming experience, she’s noticed a deep personal connection with the land emerge in people who visit their farm—especially young people. This helps her stay hopeful about the future of small farms in America.

“You don’t decide you’re going to connect somebody to the land, but it can happen,” she says. “And for that brief period of time when we’re open, people get to feel like it’s theirs.”

T Sharyn Morrow/sharynshoots.com

The originators of the pizza farm concept, veteran farmers Robbi Bannen and Ted Fisher, never really expected their “unplanned” idea to take off. The couple was struggling to keep up with delivering produce through their community supported agriculture (CSA) program and lugging it to regional farmers’ markets. So Bannen and Fisher struck upon a way to have customers to come to their farm in Stockholm, which is located about an hour southwest of Eau Claire near the Mississippi River.

Both had extensive experience working in restaurants and decided on a whim to build a wood-fired oven out of locally sourced brick and construct a commercial kitchen in their barn. Bannen says they opened A to Z Produce and Bakery in 1998 “to make sourdough bread and use the things that we grew to make pizza.”

A to Z’s motto, “Where the farm is the table,” sums up the experience. Diners bring their own chairs and picnic blankets and settle in a spot surrounded by the very vegetables that they will enjoy on their pizza, from tomatoes in the sauce to radicchio, shallots, and other innovative toppings. Pigs, sheep, and cattle languidly graze, keeping the fields fertile and (eventually) providing delicious meats for toppings like A to Z’s homemade lamb sausage. Bannen creates her own pizza crust and bread using wheat that is harvested and stone ground right on the farm.

“We really love doing what we’re doing. For us it’s always been about making great-tasting food,” says Bannen. “It’s not that easy to make a living selling vegetables, [but making pizzas] allows us to keep growing vegetables.”

Fisher works the brick oven on Tuesday pizza nights, from March to October. Deep into the summer months, the farm is bustling like a fairground and diners can expect upwards of an hour wait for their specialty pies. While the off-season is quieter, Bannen says that she typically works “sixteen-hour days, seven days a week.”

Their customers have definitely changed since 1998. “Twenty years ago, everybody that came here had a farm in their history,”

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

o say that Tony Schultz, who refers to Bannen and Fisher as the “godmother and godfather” of pizza farms, was influenced by A to Z’s model is putting it lightly.

Schultz, along with wife Kat Becker, is owner and operator of Stoney Acres Farm in Athens, which is about half an hour west of Wausau. Schultz takes the concept of locally sourced very seriously. Even though he doesn’t produce his own pizza cheese, Schultz sources his base of Monterey Jack and mozzarella from nearby Bletsoe’s Cheese—and Bletsoe’s uses only milk from dairy farmers within a ten-mile radius. Other artisan cheeses that end up on Schultz’s pies come from across the state: blue cheese from Black River Blue, fresh mozzarella from Crave Brothers Farmstead Classics in Waterloo, and gouda from Marieke’s Gouda in Thorp.

Like A to Z’s pizza, everything else on a Stoney Acres pizza has been grown or created right on the farm. Organic wheat is grown, harvested, and freshly ground into flour for the homemade dough.

Schultz’s sage, oregano, and basil are used for the homemade sauce, as are his tomatoes and toppings such as mushrooms, onions, butternut squash, rainbow beets, kale, broccoli, and peppers, just to name a few.

Schultz’s pastured pigs are processed locally by Custom Meats of Marathon or Geiss Meat Service in Merrill, and cured into ham, prosciutto, and bacon, all without the use of nitrates. His grass-fed cows are butchered only in early summer or early fall, after the largest flushes of cool season grasses and clovers, adding to the flavor and nutritional quality of the meats, which are then dry-aged for at least two weeks at Custom Meats.

For Schultz, locally sourced means supporting the community in which he was raised. Schultz, who grew up on Stoney Acres when it was a fifty-cow conventional dairy operation, is a third-generation farmer; the farm has been in his family since the 1940s. After earning his degree at UW–Madison in 2004, Schultz took over and converted the operation to an organic farm. He started marketing his produce through the Wausau Farmers’ Market, and was integral in starting the Wausau Winter Market, both of which are located near the riverfront in the heart of downtown. In 2007 he opened a community supported agriculture business, which has grown from delivering fresh vegetables to 72 members to two-hundred members today.

It was in 2012, at a Farmers Union meeting, that Schultz met Bannen and Fisher and first heard about their pizza farm concept.

And he decided to “steal” the idea, as he likes to put it, but he ensures that credit is always given where due.

Wisconsin Table

At a time when industrial farming deeply influences the foods we purchase and the way we prepare them, small farms are rethinking how they deliver their products, maintain their businesses, and support their families. As more consumers become invested in learning about where their food comes from and how it is grown and prepared for market, small family farms can benefit.

“I care about food first,” says Schultz, noting how a great meal can bring people together from different backgrounds. “Pizza is the perfect food [because] it bridges certain food experiences. My neighbors are here eating my arugula on my pizza, people drive from Minneapolis or Chicago or Madison to a small town in central Wisconsin to have pizza on our farm. Serving this type of food and producing food in this way brings so many people out to the farm. It makes us successful.”

Candice Wagener is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Brava and Isthmus, and she’s excited to add Wisconsin People & Ideas to her list of publications. Wagener lives in Middleton with her husband and two rambunctious boys, who make her laugh every day.

Robbi Bannen/A to Z Produce & Bakery

“This idea originated in the Midwest, western Wisconsin. Take that, East Coast,” quips Schultz.

Visitors to Stoney Acres are in for a true Wisconsin-farm experience, with cows grazing, pigs rooting around, and an occasional rogue chicken wandering out of the coop. Kids are free to run around, explore, even dig in the horseshoe pit that substitutes as a sandbox. Adults can relax on the lawn and watch the sunset, or stroll the grounds while they wait for their wood-fired pies. If it rains, no problem: a renovated granary seats up to a hundred people.

The farm is open to the public for pizza every Friday, from late April to early November. New this year, Stoney Acres is also opening its doors on Saturdays to customers who purchase tickets online.

Schultz and Becker work three brick ovens, which are started the night before in order to reach the nine-hundred degrees required to cook the pizzas in about five minutes. Diners are welcome to bring other foods to supplement the pies and can also enjoy a local brew or mead from a new beer garden opened just last year.

Schultz is a big fan of the Margherita pizzas, but he has many other unique creations that change with the seasons. Spring brings “It’s All Clover Now, Baby Blue,” a pie with blue cheese and sprinkles of purple clover, as well as “The Scape Goat,” which includes chèvre and minced garlic scapes. In fall, Schultz turns his squash into sauce for creations such as the “Fall’n in Love,” featuring butternut squash, blue cheese, caramelized onions and leeks, apples, and sausage. (“I’m partial to puns,” admits Schultz.)

Schultz says that seasonality is “the inspiration and muse” for the pizzas. But there’s also a sense of place that comes through in each pizza, a real flavor of the land and all of its bounty “We’re doing ramps now, microgreens are coming out of the hoop house, arugula is coming out of the fields, and I foraged some fiddleheads which were sticking out of the forest floor,” he says.

But Schultz stresses that Stoney Acres is a farm first—80% of his time during the week is dedicated to tending his vegetable crops and maintaining his produce business. The pizza element allows the farm to open its doors to friends, neighbors, and others to showcase its beauty and functionality, while diversifying his revenue stream.

SUMMER 2017

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Report

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Report

Growing Our Creative Power Good ideas and best practices gleaned from the Academy Talks series

BY ANNE KATZ

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ver the course of my more than 22 years as executive director of Arts Wisconsin, I have worked to place the arts and creativity at the center of life and learning

throughout Wisconsin. As you can imagine, this has involved a lot of travel across the state. Travel is actually the best part of my job, because it takes me to the real issues affecting people in our communities.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my travels is that the arts and creativity are integral to every aspect of life in our communities. There’s creativity everywhere and in all people, whether they call themselves an artist or not. But the applications for creativity go far beyond the canvas and stage. The thorny issues that arise in business, education, environment, technology, development, and recreation are often resolved through community involvement, thoughtful collaboration, imaginative processes, innovative thinking, and entrepreneurship—all things that are fueled by creativity.

For example, during the mid-2000s, Eau Claire civic leaders and residents began drawing on the power of creativity to improve life in this small city of 65,000 people. Located at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers, Eau Claire had for years been a thriving industrial hub. This began to change in the 1990s, as Michelin/Uniroyal and other manufacturing plants shuttered operations across the region and people began to move away in search of better opportunities. Through a planning process called Clear

Vision Eau Claire, citizens forged a public/private commitment to the arts and culture that became an important economic development strategy for the city. Today Eau Claire is gaining national attention as a small city with big-time creative opportunities and a focus on cultivating homegrown creative talent. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently noted that “the bigger story is how deftly this former factory town has pivoted to embrace the arts, technology, and innovation—boosting tourism and attracting new, young transplants in the process.”

A similar success story about the power of creativity can be found in downtown Green Lake. Located on the northern shore of Green Lake in Central Wisconsin, this small resort town is in the process of adding cultural assets to a portfolio of largely recreational opportunities. Anchored by the Town Square (the former county courthouse), the Thrasher Opera House, and a regular Farmers' Market, Green Lake’s increasingly vibrant downtown provides residents and visitors alike with education, recreation, and culinary opportunities, as well as art fairs featuring local and regional artists.

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Amanda E. Shilling

Amanda E. Shilling

Report

Startups need opportunity, creative workspace, and working capital to succeed, according to “The Entrepreneurial Edge” panelists (l to r) Gregory St. Fort, Ben Richgruber, and Tryg Jacobson.

“The Art of Discovery” panelists and Academy Fellows (l to r) Bassam Shakhashiri, Marcia Bjornerud, Laura Kiessling, and Robert Matthieu believe that problem-selection skills are as important as problem-solving skills.

“We believe in community and making the most of our assets, and that working together makes and keeps us strong,” says Fran Hill, chief executive officer of Green Lake Renewal, the grassroots organization leading the downtown revitalization efforts.

What these two communities have in common is that they are both intentionally developing an arts and culture sector that generates jobs and revenue, one version of what people are calling creative economy development. We examined how Eau Claire and Green Lake are cultivating their creative economies, as well as other ways creativity can improve life in Wisconsin, during the Growing Our Creative Power series of Academy Talks. Developed by the Wisconsin Academy and presented in partnership with Arts Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, with support from Isthmus Publishing, the series examined the elements of a creative economy that make the most sense for Wisconsin, and the ways we can harness and grow these elements to make our communities and our state stronger and more vibrant.

Presented during Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, the series of six public talks explored cultivating creative economies on the local and state levels; the power of a liberal arts education for lifelong success; the critical importance of the arts and creativity in a quality 21stcentury education for all students; ways to invest in entrepreneurship, creativity, imagination, and innovation; the role of the arts in economic, downtown, and community development; and the importance of creativity in scientific exploration and discovery.

All of the organizations behind the Growing Our Creative Power series are deeply committed to creating a better future for Wisconsin. We focused our attention on creativity because we are living in an era when artistry, imagination, innovation, and entrepreneurship are directly connected to the health of our businesses, schools, communities, and individual lives.

Wisconsin, like the rest of the country and the world, is living through massive economic shifts, societal changes, and political upheavals as our once-industrial economy transitions to a 21stcentury information and service economy. In Wisconsin, traditional industries—from papermaking to mining to farming—continue to be

important, but new technologies and global trends are forcing these industries to evolve.

To move through the seismic economic, educational, and civic changes that surround us and to imagine a brighter future require not only building on our past but also creatively using our existing assets. Our work on Growing Our Creative Power focused on understanding what it takes to cultivate our creative capacities on the local level. We learned that this requires finding common ground and planning well but remaining open to change. Developing a creative economy in particular requires a commitment to partnership and honest collaboration (and, oftentimes, a sense of humor).

As Fran Hill of Green Lake Renewal notes, this process requires “focusing on talent, ability, engagement, and a community’s unique and authentic assets.”

Through the Growing Our Creative Power series, we learned that one of the essential components of a successful creative economy is committed community members—and not just artists and designers, but also entrepreneurs, elected officials, small business owners, teachers, developers, and volunteers all working together toward a shared vision. Significantly, a greater level of commitment is often seen among citizens who have been nurtured in an education system that fosters creative thinkers.

Good creative economies also feature business incubators that value diversity, inclusivity, trust, and interactions that mix rightand left-brain people—a must for startups that want to ignite the creative spark. However, even with the right components, creative economies won’t work over time unless everyone involved is willing to take risks, potentially fail, and be willing to try again.

During the series, the Academy brought together an impressive list of speakers from across government, education, business, and nonprofit sectors. Sheila Smith, executive director of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, kicked off the series with a discussion of how

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Watch videos from our Growing Our Creative Power series online at wisconsinacademy.org/creativeWI.

Report

public investment in the arts and creativity provides both cultural and economic opportunity. Smith noted how this investment helps to build a sense of place on state and local levels, which in turn helps retain residents and forge stronger communities.

Certainly, public funding of the arts is a part of the creative economy mix. This kind of support reflects public values, celebrates the creative spirit, and expands access to ideas and knowledge for all. On the federal level, as of this writing, the proposed FY2018 federal budget calls for the elimination of our nation’s cultural agencies, including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. This would be a devastating blow for Wisconsin and the United States. Without public investment that supports local creative endeavors and entrepreneurship, our communities could miss out on new opportunities for growth—and risk being left behind by a rapidly changing global economy.

So how can we develop creative capacity on a local level? During our series of talks, we learned that finding the resources (and not just money) to make an investment in creativity is an ongoing process. Capital projects and programs happen just like any other development project: with grassroots fundraising, public/private funds, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Our panel in “The Entrepreneurial Edge” noted that in addition to capital, all startups need workspaces that provide creative collisions. But startups also need business basics such as up-to-date technology, legal advice, and health insurance to flourish. Entrepreneur Tryg Jacobson reported on the wide range of creative startups, from forensic accounting to film editing businesses, happening at Jake’s Café in Sheboygan. The success of creative coworking communities such as Jake's Café are a good reminder that everyone can do a better job of understanding (and appreciating) how the power of creativity fuels all kinds of industry.

Unleashing the power of creativity begins with giving our students a broad-based education, one that equips them to navigate a world that increasingly values innovation and nimble thinking.

The panelists in our “Raising Creative Kids” talk noted that while the arts can and should be built into K–12 programs, the roots of creativity also need to be nurtured in and out of school by making time for free play, exploration in nature, and just “messing around” without structured experiences. Reading, risk-taking, and problem-solving are habits that stoke a creative mind, according to our panelists, who noted that families and teachers can encourage these and other creative habits by nurturing a child’s sense of humor, flexibility, and self-acceptance. Indeed, part of developing what one panelist described as “fearless autonomy” is a child’s ability to debate thoughtfully with adults.

A current thrust in K–12 education is the elevation of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) to give students specific content and skills necessary for success in a world that increasingly values innovation in these fields. In his talk on higher education, “The Power of the Liberal Arts,” the late Thomas Pleger described how investments in liberal arts education augment K–12 STEAM efforts. Pleger, who was president of Lake Superior State University and former campus executive officer and dean of UW–

Baraboo/Sauk County, argued that students exposed to a broad cross-disciplinary education develop good communications skills, ethics, empathy, and the ability to make connections across disciplines—all skills that 21st-century citizens, leaders, and innovators need. Pleger further asserted that the real measure for return on investment in education is found not in a high-paying job but in one’s capacity for problem solving, critical thinking, and leadership.

One of the fruits of creativity in higher education is scientific discovery. In “The Art of Discovery,” four Wisconsin Academy Fellows with deep expertise in science talked about what it takes to “teach discovery.” Their discussion echoed what earlier panelists said about the power of bringing together people with different perspectives. Unique to science, however, are the concepts of embracing wonder at the complexities and beauty of living and non-living systems; exploring metaphorical thinking to reach new insights; considering how to experiment, observe, and explore in productive ways; and rewarding curiosity and questioning.

From my work on the Growing Our Creative Power series and with Arts Wisconsin, I see the ways in which cultural investment, creative development, and community strategies focused on enhancing quality of life, increasing economic opportunity, and stimulating innovative ideas are already paying off big time for the state. Seize the day, Wisconsin! Let’s do more to encourage and invest in creativity, imagination, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the local level and help move our communities forward into the 21st century.

Anne Katz is executive director of Arts Wisconsin, Wisconsin’s independent statewide community arts action, service, and development organization, whose mission is to nurture, serve, promote, and speak up for the arts in Wisconsin and all of its communities.

GROWING OUR CREATIVE POWER Thanks to Wisconsin Academy members, donors, and the following partners for their support:

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Photo Essay

All In

Shorewood Girls Cross Country

BY LOIS BIELEFELD In terms of attendance, compensation, and overall media presence, women’s sports are almost always eclipsed by those of their male counterparts.

This gender imbalance trickles down to the high school level, where there are often more opportunities and resources for boys. What does this communicate to girls about their value as athletes—and as young women?

My daughter entered Shorewood High School in 2014, and, despite my anxiety, it was a smooth transition. I attribute this mainly to her joining the cross country running team. I was an art kid in high school and never participated in organized athletics. Yet even I noticed there was something different about the cross country team: these young women joined primarily for the sense of community they found here. For many, the running came second.

During the team’s 2015 season, my camera followed 61 high school girls, two dedicated assistant coaches, and head coach Sarah Kopplin (whom the girls call “Spence),” in an attempt to understand how organized sports can contribute to a young woman’s sense of self. I participated in a three-day camping trip, eight 5k cross country meets (including bus trips to and from), and numerous in-home pasta dinners on nights before meets with all—yes, all—of the girls.

I never thought I would do a sports-themed photography project. Not long into it, I realized I wasn’t. At least, not entirely. Instead, I was making a documentary coming-of-age project about bonding and self-development, and capturing the vibrant space in which it all happens.

The Shorewood Girls Cross Country Team’s 2015 motto, All In, reflects the kindness and respect these girl show each other as well as the cross country runners from other schools. It also signals their full participation in the traditions and rituals that foster community and a sense of belonging. And, perhaps most important, All In means that each girl gives her all to her teammates and, in turn, discovers an inner strength she never knew she had.

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Lois Bielefeld is a series-based artist who works in photography, film, audio, and installation. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and the Racine Art Museum. A 2012 recipient of the Nohl Fellowship, Bielefeld has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, ArtStart, Walker’s Point Center for the Art, and UW campus galleries across the state. She lives in Milwaukee with her daughter and wife. Lois Bielefeld is represented

by Portrait Society Gallery.

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Profile

The Nature of Art BIOINSPIRED ARTIST PETER KRSKO

BY STEVEN POTTER

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round the turn on a cobbled path that runs through Madi-

son’s Olbrich Botanical Gardens, TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

Peter Krsko perches on top of a ladder next to a tree, holding a handful of what look like unnumbered yardsticks. As visitors pass by, they pause and watch him add a few of the slender pine lath pieces to one of three vertical frames that extend from the ground to the thick branches overhead.

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Bioinspired art is a process that entails “exploring the material properties of nature, the cycles and dynamics of nature, and how whole biological systems are structured—and putting that into works of art.”

Previous page: Peter Krsko stands amidst Renewal (with collaborating artist Katie Schofield’s Turkey Tails), one in a series of bio-inspired art installations on view at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison.

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Breaking his focus briefly, he makes an odd declaration for someone who’s been wielding a nail gun all morning: “It’s like meditation,” he says, laughing a bit, as he fires another stripe of tiny nails into the soft wood.

While Krsko works, he chats with an elderly couple and then a younger woman and her two-year-old daughter, discussing what the structures might represent and how he builds them. Everyone mentions how the structures, narrow at the base and expanding as they reach toward the sky, resemble trees.

“It symbolizes the explosion of growth in nature,” Krsko says nonchalantly and adds that the name of the piece is Renewal.

Inspired by long walks in the woods, Renewal comes from his desire to create a piece in which “the lumber and lath are returned back to their original, organic form.”

The art that Krsko makes, like his Renewal piece at Olbrich Gardens, is heavily influenced by nature and science. He calls this type of work bioinspired art. Though he doesn’t have a hard-andfast definition for it, Krsko explains his process as “taking the time and observing nature—so, really learning from nature—then taking that as inspiration and using it to create art.”

While many artists are willing to share their inspiration and process, very few are willing to openly discuss what their pieces are meant to symbolize or represent. But Krsko has learned to be upfront about his work, mostly because his process is equal parts creative, iterative, and instructive.

According to Krsko, bio-inspired art “is not just about painting a picture of a flower or creating a replica or a sculpture of a flower.”

Rather, he notes, it is a process that entails “exploring the material properties of nature, the cycles and dynamics of nature, and how whole biological systems are structured—and putting that into works of art.”

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riginally from the central European country of Slovakia, Krsko moved to the United States in 1989, at age eighteen, to attend the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. It’s there that his passion for science and love of art began to converge.

During his sophomore year, Krsko was invited to work in a lab where researchers studied biomedical polymers. He was immediately drawn to the lab’s scanning electron microscope. “I went into such detail in studying the instrument that I was able to not only look at things with it but [I was] also actually making stuff with it,” he recalls. “I used the electron-beam as a pencil or pen and was able to modify the polymers that were inside the lab samples and create structures.” Using his newfound favorite tool and some computer mapping technology, Krsko created a microscopic replica of an Albert Einstein portrait—1/10th the diameter of a human hair—by isolating surface areas where cells could grow to form the image of the famous scientist.

It was also during his undergrad days that Krsko found himself “surrounded by a lot of artists,” he says. “We started doing these get-togethers and shows in galleries and community art projects.”

Krsko earned his undergraduate degree and decided to stay on at the Stevens Institute for graduate school, eventually earning an interdisciplinary PhD in biophysics and material sciences.

From there, a post-doctoral stint at the National Institutes of Health sparked an interest in science education in the young artist.

Profile

Peter Krsko, Stabilimentia, 2017. “Spiders create decorative elements within their webs to attract prey, to camouflage, and to signal and communicate.

After studying the spiders’ movement and repeating it by stretching thin plastic, this form happened,” says Krsko.

However, instead of pursuing a tenure-track position, Krsko threw himself into art. In early 2009, Krsko opened an independent art studio in Washington DC where “focused on working on different art projects to teach science and expose young students to scientific disciplines.”

Today, Krsko’s résumé reads largely as a list of commissioned murals, workshops, community art projects, and gallery exhibits, as well as a few peer-reviewed publications from science journals like Langmuir and Materials Today tossed in for good measure.

His bio-inspired Stabilimentia (2016–2017), a series he’s done twice in Wisconsin, uses translucent green plastic wrap strands stretched between trees to mimic spider webs. A mural in Washington DC more than three stories high called Zebras (2013) features a throng of equids in vivid, near-symmetrical stripes that make them almost indistinguishable from one another. A smaller piece in Maryland named Warmth (2015) is a deceptively simplelooking bench made from a recovered black oak tree stump and welded steel shafts.

Krsko’s ability to fuse elements of nature and science into art has earned him plenty of commissioned work across the country. This unique ability has also led to an artist residency at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arts Institute, an independent division within the university that draws from faculty and staff in a wide range of departments and arts-related fields to create and generate conditions for bold thinking and creative problem solving.

Created almost twenty years ago, the residency at the Arts Institute aims to “foster collaborative research, education, and outreach by creating new interdisciplinary areas of knowledge that cross boundaries,” says Kate Hewson, an assistant director at the Institute. Hewson says that Krsko was a perfect fit for the semester-long

residency, noting his “unique combination of arts practice, science research, and education focus.”

For the spring 2017 residency, titled Zoethica: Bioinspired Art and Science, Krsko led a class of mainly science- and engineering-track undergraduates through discussions and readings on ethical problems facing scientists today and assisted them in creating bio-influenced art pieces. “The goal was to observe nature using scientific methods and get inspired to create art,” he says.

The title Zoethica, which is a portmanteau of zoe (the Greek word for “life”) and the word ethics, set the stage for a series of complex discussions in which the students weren’t the only ones learning in class. “We talked a lot about policy issues,” says Krsko, “and one word that I learned from the students was greenwashing, [where a company] uses the whole theme of green products only as a marketing image to sell new products and distracts from the main issue of pollution.”

Sometimes, discussions strayed into what-ifs and even science fiction. “[We discussed that] perhaps we’ll someday create a new kind of nature that’s based on or inspired by real nature but it’s completely separated from the real nature. Is that dangerous? Is it okay to do?”

Krsko recalls. “In many discussions, I was just listening.”

For the second part of the class, the students and Krsko created almost two-dozen large-scale, science-centric art pieces for the exhibit at Olbrich Gardens. This was not an easy task for students with little art experience. Still, the students created projects that touched on a variety of topics and a wide range of media: a huge replica of a conch shell made from wood, a map made from broken glass depicting the violence of habitat fragmentation, a time-lapse video of a project that used soil-dwelling slime mold to illustrate how infectious diseases spread across the world.

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Profile

TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

Peter Krsko, Monarda, 2016. “In late January, during a hike through a thawing marsh, I came across dry plants with the remnants of what must have been a flower. Back in the studio I attempted to “rebuild” the dead flower by attaching truncated cones to each other, until the spherical surface emerged.”

Krsko’s students then created project-based lesson plans (downloadable at zoethica.com) for use by either elementary or middle school teachers interested in having their own students explore and discuss the intersection of science, art, and nature.

Sundaram Gunasekaran, a professor of food engineering in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering and lead sponsor for the Arts Institute artist residency, says Krsko was a very welcome addition to the campus because “his ability to communicate and convey scientific ideas through his art is very inspiring and thought-provoking for students.” Hopefully, adds Gunasekaran, Zoethica “will help them engage in other things and see things in a new perspective.”

Indeed, Krsko also has hopes that his students, the next generation of scientists, can draw on their experience to better explain their work to non-scientists. “I think they are looking at and seeing how to explain their scientific research in engaging ways,” he says.

“And now, perhaps they can maybe use art to do that and open conversations with people who would otherwise not think they have something in common.”

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oethica is what brings Krsko and his art to Olbrich Gardens on Madison’s east side, near the shores of Lake Monona. In addition to featuring a few of Krsko’s installation pieces, Olbrich is showcasing Zoethica student artwork as well as the bio-inspired art

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of guest artists Katie Schofield and Dan Steinhilber throughout the sprawling sixteen-acre grounds during Summer 2017.

“I wanted a space that is relevant to the theme of the course [and] I feel more comfortable showing my work in public spaces,” explains Krsko, adding “Olbrich is a great venue.”

Among the dozens of projects and pieces he’s completed in the last handful of years, the one that brought him to Wisconsin was Tree from Within, created for the 2015 Fermentation Festival in Reedsburg. The piece invited observers to step inside a carved-out space within a dense pile of branches to explore a tree from a truly unusual point of view.

In 2016, Krsko returned to Fermentation Fest with a mix of artistic furniture and sculptures for an installation he called Fermee Lab. This was the same year that Krsko made Wisconsin his home, settling into the rural Village of Wonewoc in Juneau County. “I just fell in love with all the people here and the landscape … and the food,” he says with a smile.

Krsko says his main goal with both Zoethica and his artwork in general is to spark curiosity. He notes that if people “develop a strong appreciation of nature [and] look around and question everything—spend some time with every little flower, with every stone on the ground, … [we learn] not to separate ourselves as humans from nature or to be above it.” Only then, he says, will we “appreciate nature and realize we are a really a small part [of it]—and that we don’t know enough about it.”

Profile

TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

Dan Steinhilber, Untitled, 2017. “Any fantasy I may have had to make some marble statuary for a garden changed with the improvisation [combining] cytoskeleton structure, silk worm wrapping, and the natural ‘behavior’ of these unnatural materials used in agriculture,” says Steinhilber.

When asked what drives him, Krsko says he has a deep desire “to educate and to build strong and healthy communities … through community art, interactive art, art that’s strongly inspired by different elements in nature.”

Drawing on his own family roots—two grandfathers were woodworkers—Krsko has turned his creative attention to wood, specifically the narrow pine lath. “It’s energy, it’s power, and it’s renewable,” he says of working with wood. “And with these pieces, it’s all improvised— there are no drawings, no sketches, no blueprints, no levels, no measuring tapes.”

In addition to the Renewal installation at Olbrich Gardens, he’s created a number of lath-based installations around the country, including a large piece in the lobby of the UW–Madison’s Birge Hall and one at the Wormfarm Institute’s Woolen Mill Gallery in Reedsburg.

Whether it’s with his own work, through the UW–Madison class and residency, or on another future adventure, Krsko hopes to keep “exploring the possibility that there is no boundary between science and art.”

Over the summer, Krsko is spending time on projects around Wisconsin and then heading down to do a piece at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago before making his way to Austin, Texas. In between these projects, Krsko is dropping in on his old hometown of Washington DC to work on a community-based history project: a replica of the 19th century home of Reverend Richard A. Hall, one of

the first black-owned properties in the city, built just years after the end of the Civil War. Krsko has a lot on his plate. So when he’s home in Wonewoc, he simply cherishes the outdoors. Often he can be found around a fire pit or trying to tame overgrown berry bushes or doing nothing at all other than just being in nature. “Sometimes, I just sit in my backyard and watch the grass grow,” he says. “There is just so much to enjoy when we take the time to see it.”

Steven Potter is a reporter who began his career in Milwaukee but now lives in his hometown of Madison. Potter’s work has appeared in Isthmus, Milwaukee Magazine, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He’s currently a journalism graduate student at UW–Madison with a focus on multimedia reporting and data visualization.

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@ The watrous gallery

Douglas Bosley, Interrupt, 2015. Mezzotint, 8 x 10 inches.

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@ The watrous gallery

Douglas Bosley, Isomorphous Replacement, 2015. Mezzotint, 20 x 12 inches.

Douglas Bosley THE UNEXPLORED MAP

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ouglas Bosley’s large-scale prints lure viewers into a mysterious world of the artist’s construction. His finely detailed mezzotints present a future version of earth, where the familiar environment has been eclipsed by engineered ecosystems and mechanical creations run amok. Dramatic tonal contrasts and delicate lines lend gravitas to Bosley’s fantastic imagery.

Central to his fictional world are colonies of micro-robots called Auxons, self-replicating systems that reproduce exponentially until they reach critical mass. In exploring the Auxons’ collective activities, Bosley’s work proposes an alternate history and future with roots in the logic of physical laws. The curious and strangely comical nature of these robot “creatures” plays counterpoint to more serious themes.

Bosley’s project questions the inevitability of history, and posits that because humans can effect real change in the world, we must claim responsibility for our actions.

Douglas Bosley is the recipient of an Illustrator of the Future award and winner of the National Society of Arts and Letters National Competition in Printmaking for 2013.

His work has appeared at shows across the world and in the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Texas Tech University, the Southern Graphics Council Print Collection and Archives, and the Wisconsin Union Art Collection.

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@ The watrous gallery

Douglas Bosley, Point Singularity I, 2015.

Mezzotint, 10 x 17 inches.

Douglas Bosley, Point Anomaly II, 2016.

Mezzotint, 16 x 12 inches.

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@ The watrous gallery

Scott Espeseth, Night Windows, 2014. Ink on paper, 11 x 13 inches.

Scott Espeseth SIGNAL BLEED

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rained as a printmaker, Scott Espeseth works these days primarily with the simplest of art materials: pencil, pen, and watercolor. His small, meticulously wrought images present places and things that seem animated by a lurking consciousness. These mundane, unpeopled spaces—a backyard, an empty room, a kitchen counter—take on a heightened reality, or a hallucinatory unreality. In Espeseth’s hands, ordinary objects like window-frames, casserole dishes, and Band-Aid boxes become weighty and portentous. Eerily still, they suggest memory intruding upon the present, the future leaving messages for the past, or something rising from the subconscious. Like passing flashes of clarity, they reveal unease just below the surface, as if internal warnings and insights were embedded in the ordinary stuff of daily life.

Scott Espeseth earned an MFA in printmaking from UW–Madison where he worked with storied print artists Frances Myers and Warrington Colescott. His work, exhibited extensively in the U.S., has since evolved to focus mainly on drawing with commonplace media such as graphite pencils and ballpoint pen. Espeseth has been on the faculty of Beloit College since 2002, teaching all levels of drawing and printmaking.

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@ The watrous gallery

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@ The watrous gallery

SEE THE EXHIBITION DOUGLAS BOSLEY: THE UNEXPLORED MAP SCOTT ESPESETH: SIGNAL BLEED JULY 7-AUGUST 27, 2017

Above: Scott Espeseth, Bathroom, 2014. Ink on paper, 10.75 x 8.5 inches.

Previous page: (top) Weep, 2015. Ink on paper, 11 x 16 inches. (bottom) Glare, 2016. Ink on paper, 11 x 16 inches.

Exhibition events:

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, JULY 14, 5:30–7:30 PM, WITH ARTISTS’ TALKS AT 6:30 PM ART@NOON GALLERY TALK FRIDAY, AUGUST 25 Exhibition support comes from Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following sponsors:

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Fiction

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Fiction

MUDSTONE

BY BOB WAKE

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his was something Joy Frisk told us one August night around a campfire on a bluff overlooking the boathouse. Joy Frisk was high. Pain meds, most likely. Once in an unguarded moment she confessed torrents of pain and wept. The noble Viking, she called her Vicodin.

The scalloped brain-surgery scar on the side of her head glowed moist in the firelight. We were going to tell ghost stories. Bloody-hand-on-the-car-windshield ghost stories. Joy Frisk said, “No, there’s something about ghost stories that infuriates me. There need be no fear of death.” Her eyes rolled back into her head like slot-machine emoji. “Not because I believe in an afterlife,” she said. “Not because I believe I’ll be greeted in the clouds by distant generations of annoying relatives.” …

“The enamel on our teeth is durable enough for hundreds of years of use,” said Joy Frisk. “Flesh is a laggard,” she told us. “We can harness the human and we can surpass the human. The posthuman will be the most human of all.” …

“We’re halfway there,” says Monica Vitti to Alain Delon in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse. Of course they’re in the middle of a city crosswalk in Rome. Middle of a courtship ritual. But more importantly: “Potentiality unfolding,” said Joy Frisk. “We’re half-realized. Each of us. As human beings. As a species.”

The final minutes of L’Eclisse are a montage of city life devoid of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. The lovers erased. Joy Frisk described the phenomenon in remarks she made following a sparsely attended screening of L’Eclisse in the Mudstone Cinémathèque: “That which precedes us proceeds without us. Our absence will save us. This is how we arrive at love.” …

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Mudstone was constructed and christened as a Northwoods fishing resort outside of Hayward, Wisconsin, in mid-20th century America. Original structures remain. Weathered clapboard lodge building. Dining hall. Conference room (now the Cinémathèque). Kitchen. Second-floor staff quarters. Six mildewy cabins randomly arranged throughout the woods. All in all, neither imposing nor haunted. The seldom-mowed ryegrass lawn of the lodge slopes gracefully for an acre and a half and reaches finitude at the shoreline. Mudstone Lake is modest in dimension— five leisurely motorboat minutes across in the Alumacraft four-seater—and seasonal squalls on the waters are childlike in their timidity. …

J U D G E’S N OTES

ALEX BLEDSOE It’s rare that I actually, literally laugh out loud reading a story, but this one got me a couple of times. It’s filled with what seem to me to be quintessentially Wisconsin details and observations. Also, I like the fractured timeline and scattershot structure, which make the scenes even funnier.

…

For Joy Frisk, who sometimes saw herself as a spiritual heir to the fabled Desert Mothers of early Syrian Christianity, the lush Thoreauvian Northwoods of Wisconsin were a distraction rather than an inspiration. Allergies afflicted Joy Frisk spring, summer, fall, winter. She once remarked, “Nature is best experienced behind fine mesh mosquito netting and a surgicalgrade respirator mask.” …

Joy Frisk and her husband, the late Soren Frisk, took on Mudstone’s debt and meager assets from the late Soren Frisk’s great-uncle and great-aunt, the late Gabe Frisk and his wife, Oleanna Frisk. …

Joy Frisk and her husband, the late Soren Frisk, drove Mudstone further into debt. …

Lumber was imported at exorbitant cost rather than locally sourced for Joy Frisk’s all-season insulated tree house therapy-den in the branches of a towering oak behind the lodge. Next was the money-pit conversion of the resort’s former conference room into a fifty-seat movie theater, aka the Cinémathèque. The professional-quality DLP projector was the size of a mini-fridge and rated at an exceedingly bright 40,000 lumens. Speaker towers and subwoofers were powered by a bank of seven-channel 3,000-watt Marantz receivers.

The top-notch digital projection and sound system might have attracted paying customers from neighboring towns had not Joy Frisk’s predilection for what she called “unadorned cinema”—in particular, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s three-hour and twenty-minute depiction of middle-class household routine slowly disrupted by repressed sexual degradation, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—left local audiences baffled at first and then bored out of their skulls. …

“Worse than watching paint dry,” said fifty-five-year-old Jeanne Dielman attendee Wynton Oakley, hardware-store manager from nearby Tempest. “It was buying paint. It was mixing paint. It was buying paint supplies and a few impulse purchases, I don’t know, light bulbs, say, or some potting soil. It was stopping at the gas station on the way home. It was driving home. It was changing into paint clothes. It was putting down drop cloths. It was opening paint. It was pouring paint. It was rolling paint. Then. Then it was watching paint dry.” …

More comprehensible, if equally ignored by area filmgoers, was Joy Frisk’s admiration for the documentary Into Great Silence and its quietist Trappist monks going about their real-time daily monastic lives. …

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Only once—disastrously—did Joy Frisk seek common ground with audiences by screening Freaky Friday, the 2003 mother-daughter body-switch comedy starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. “The self is porous,” Joy Frisk suggested as a mindful prompt before showing the film to a robust crowd comprising everyone staying then at Mudstone—a solid half-dozen at the time—and assorted townies and rural families with teens or younger. A boisterous drive-in theater crowd, in other words, thoroughly disrespectful of the Cinémathèque’s retractable loungers. The Cinémathèque’s vegan concession stand—unsalted pan-seared corn nuts, roasted chickpeas, and an assortment of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables— was ignored. Milk Duds, Junior Mints, gas-station slushies, and hot dogs were smuggled in by indulgent parents. Chocolate smears and soda residue were left embedded in seat cushions and carpeting like radioactive waste. …

The late Matt Jardine used to say, “You must learn to mythologize yourself because it's unlikely that anyone else will do it for you— or worse, they'll get it wrong.”

We were sitting around the dining hall after dinner one cool September evening. Five of us huddled near the wood-burning stove. Oleanna Frisk, Mudstone’s chef of long standing (meant all too literally in one respect, as she was on her feet much of the day), prepared garlic flatbread and stuffed green peppers filled with sriracha-infused tofu and sunflower seeds. A meal guaranteed to rigorously flush sinuses and bowels like a high-powered colonic. We were laughing, the coffee was as strong as the sriracha, and we were bullshitting about the late Matt Jardine. Though, of course, it was the late Matt Jardine whom we eulogized as a bullshitter. The late Matt Jardine used to say, “You must learn to mythologize yourself because it’s unlikely that anyone else will do it for you—or, worse, they’ll get it wrong.”

Amidst general good humor, we began mythologizing the late Matt Jardine in a postmortem game of the Minister’s Cat. “The late Matt Jardine was awkward.” “The late Matt Jardine was bewitched.” “The late Matt Jardine was confused.” “The late Matt Jardine was demonic.” “The late Matt Jardine was erratic.” “The late Matt Jardine flouted Mudstone’s Rules of Absence.” …

I knew the late Matt Jardine. Witnessed the dredging of his bloated corpse from Mudstone Lake. …

When the late Gabe Frisk—Oleanna Frisk’s husband—passed away, Mudstone transitioned overnight from a bankrupt fishing resort to a bankrupt spiritual retreat. …

Oleanna Frisk long ago renounced her membership in the Church of Sweden over what she perceived as profanation. Oleanna Frisk believed Joy Frisk’s soul was lost and ungovernable.

Oleanna Frisk believed there was much to condemn in Joy Frisk’s misguided Rules of Absence.

Nor did they bond over the deaths, three years apart, of their respective husbands, the late Gabe Frisk and the late Gabe Frisk’s great-nephew, the late Soren Frisk. Moreover, you have to marinate the bejesus out of tofu to arrive at something edible. Also a fact: The chokladbollar cookies that triggered the late Gabe Frisk’s heart attack were prepared by the late Gabe Frisk himself. Fist-sized cannonballs of chilled butter and oats. Cold press espresso. Cocoa powder.

Pearl sugar. And—always a choking hazard with the late Gabe Frisk—shredded coconut. Scabs of dough flaking from his lips and fingertips like a leper’s leavings. …

Anyone who’s been on blood pressure medication, then off blood pressure medication (most likely from being fed up with pills of any kind and a reliance on them), and back on blood pressure medication, knows the drill: “back on” blood pressure meds is the only place to be if you want to stay alive. Hypertension is mania. As if the body were producing its own meth. No doctor needs to point this out. Joy Frisk said to me in a tree house therapy-den session: “Listen, Earl. Only someone who’s experienced mania knows the desperate desire to recapture it once it’s gone. You get your blood pressure under control and then you find yourself mistaking the

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metabolic slowdown for depression. Hence your desire to get off the meds and find ways to rev up your system once again.” …

Lord, I accomplished so much when I ditched the blood pressure meds. …

I figured this out in my capacity as a building contractor. Took on projects with an exuberance that seems superhuman in recollection. I almost bought a town. Saukfield, a rural exurb twenty miles east of Madison, was hollowed out in the crash of the late aughts. Main Street properties, some in foreclosure, offered at enormous bargains. A meeting with the chamber of commerce and both local banks was a sea of raised eyebrows when I said I wanted to purchase and renovate twenty shuttered Main Street storefronts—that is, two-thirds of Saukfield’s downtown—and nurture new business enterprises. I pounced. And then I crashed. But not before winning election and briefly serving as Saukfield’s village board president. …

There were some stroke-like symptoms along the way. A divorce. My grown sons refused an opportunity to join me as partners in Earl Conklin Contracting. The economic recovery was sluggish. The Peeping Tom behavior started in earnest after the second bankruptcy. But give me a break. What’s to see in Saukfield’s midnight windows besides the spaceship glow of HDTV? …

Saukfield villagers voted me out of office in a recall election. …

Lois Pettigrew was at Mudstone to clear her head for writing a novel. Joy Frisk suggested to Lois Pettigrew that writer’s block is a useful tool if embraced for what Joy Frisk called its “palette-cleansing absence.” …

The crack about the late Matt Jardine flouting Mudstone’s Rules of Absence came from Lois Pettigrew, who was staying in the cabin adjacent to the late Matt Jardine's, and with whom it’s believed the late Matt Jardine shared a love affair. Certainly something threatened the late Matt Jardine’s marriage and brought the late Matt Jardine’s wife, Teri Feldspar-Jardine, gunning the Grand Cherokee from Madison to Mudstone to “rescue”—Lois Pettigrew’s word—her husband. Teri Feldspar-Jardine brought along their daughter, Valerie Jardine-Mikkelson, and Valerie Jardine-Mikkelson’s husband, Cyrus Mikkelson, a Mound, Minnesota, metalworker. …

“Nature is best experienced behind fine mesh mosquito netting and a surgical-grade respirator mask.”

There was shouting that day in the Mudstone parking lot. …

The late Matt Jardine held his ground. …

The late Matt Jardine’s family departed. …

And, I remember now. Joy Frisk said to Lois Pettigrew, “By accusing the late Matt Jardine of flouting Mudstone’s Rules of Absence, you are similarly rending the fabric of absence.” Lois Pettigrew said, “Is absence a fabric?” “Let’s not belabor the metaphor, Lois,” said Joy Frisk. …

The Mudstone Rules of Absence were pointedly just a title, below which was nothing. …

Joy Frisk called the death of her husband, the late Soren Frisk, “repressed absence.” …

The late Matt Jardine was at Mudstone to conquer the plaque psoriasis that raged across his body in varying degrees of retreat and attack throughout the year. …

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The late Matt Jardine read in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that Steve Jobs used fasts and vegan dietary restrictions as a means of inducing enlightened states of consciousness. …

The late Matt Jardine’s years as an insurance claims adjuster were unfulfilling. …

“Gnawing emptiness,” said Joy Frisk, “should not be confused for absence, which never gnaws.” …

The late Matt Jardine’s wife, Teri Feldspar-Jardine, an actuarial analyst for the City of Madison, flipped when the late Matt Jardine quit his job with American Family Insurance. The late Matt Jardine first quit meat and saturated fats. Quit smoking. Teri Feldspar-Jardine was a smoker. Teri Feldspar-Jardine was a carnivore. …

Accidental drowning was the coroner’s ruling, notwithstanding Teri Feldspar-Jardine’s threatened lawsuit. The late Matt Jardine was on retreat in a shallow grotto on the far side of Mudstone Lake. The late Matt Jardine wasn’t on Mudstone property. His journal jottings, left behind in the grotto, were simple words, single words. “Filament” was the last word.

Faint pencil on waterlogged journal paper. “Filament” made little sense to anyone. Joy Frisk suggested that the word might be “firmament.” When a digital image of the final journal page was enlarged and projected on the Cinémathèque movie screen, Joy Frisk said, “Now it looks like ‘filament’ again.” …

Lois Pettigrew’s nightmares were of aloneness. A bottomless aloneness, as aloneness so often is. It was terrifying. It became a waking nightmare.

When she was with the late Matt Jardine, for instance. …

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” said the late Matt Jardine.

“Let’s find out,” said Lois Pettigrew. “I’ll close my eyes and count to ten.” …

Lois Pettigrew sought out Joy Frisk and asked her to clarify, if she could, the manner in which aloneness could be transformed into something like grace. Or novel-writing. Lois Pettigrew was convinced such a transformation was a summer asphalt mirage shimmering unobtainable in the infinite distance. For Lois Pettigrew, the worst aspect of her aloneness was that she couldn’t choose otherwise, that she, in fact, desired aloneness while at the same time feeling horribly desolate when she seemingly clutched it, hugged it close to her. Too much, she was convinced, like a death rattle rather than a creative flowering. …

“Never equate absence with devastation,” said Joy Frisk. …

The late Matt Jardine felt insulted twice over. First, for not being invited to participate in Joy Frisk’s tree house therapy-den session with Lois Pettigrew. “Maybe she’d like to hear my side of the story,” he said to Lois Pettigrew.

“This isn’t couples therapy,” said Lois Pettigrew.

And, second, “I don’t get it,” said the late Matt Jardine. “How does spending time with me cause you to feel more alone than when you’re actually alone?” …

“If I were a movie shrink,” Joy Frisk began in a tree house therapy-den session with Lois Pettigrew, “I might say something like this: ‘Your sense of aloneness is not a separation from others, whether the separation is desired or not. It is instead at root a separation from your own self. You are alienated from yourself.’ That’s what I would say if I were counseling Meg Tilly in Agnes of God. Melodrama is like caffeine. What I’m saying is that absence has no room for anything but absence.”

“So I should cut back on the Diet Pepsi and the NoDoz?” “Locate your absence.”

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“Here’s absence for you,” said Lois Pettigrew. “My husband back home in Janesville cheats too often for me to any longer give a shit. And Matt Jardine wants me sick with love. This isn’t some Carson McCullers fever dream. And I love Carson McCullers, don’t get me wrong. I wrote my Masters thesis on Reflections in a Golden Eye. The Major’s wife, crazed with jealousy, slicing off her nipples with garden shears? Me, personally? If garden shears were to be involved at all, make no mistake, they’d be pointed at my husband’s nuts, or Matt Jardine’s nuts, before I’d point them anywhere near my nipples.”

“But the buried source of the Major’s wife’s self-mutilation was a baby she’d lost in childbirth.

It wasn’t her husband’s infidelity.”

“Of course. But not exclusively.”

“How about a screening next month?” said Joy Frisk.

“A breast exam?” said Lois Pettigrew.

“A screening of Reflections in a Golden Eye. Marlon Brando. Elizabeth Taylor. Directed by John Huston. Julie Harris as the Major’s wife. The Major capably played by the underrated Brian Keith.”

“The movie isn’t very good,” said Lois Pettigrew. “Brando’s okay.” …

In 1967 John Huston wanted Reflections in a Golden Eye released not in Technicolor but in an eerie sepia tone. …

“Like watching the movie through a jar of Oleanna Frisk’s apple cider vinegar,” said Joy Frisk. …

“Matt Jardine is what we used to call ‘clingy,’ “ said Lois Pettigrew. …

“We spent one night together,” said Lois Pettigrew. …

Earl Conklin tried to recall observing anything between Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine that signaled desire. We all know the signs, thought Earl Conklin. …

It was a juice fast of some endurance that culminated in the late Matt Jardine filling a backpack with four gallons of purified Piggly Wiggly drinking water and biking to the far side of Mudstone Lake to a grotto that butted the water’s edge. Mudstoners who knew him have since speculated that the true inspiration was Lois Pettigrew, who encouraged the late Matt Jardine to read—did he really read the whole damn book?—Gustave Flaubert’s eccentric encomium to the font of Christian monasticism, The Temptation of St. Anthony. …

At first, the late Matt Jardine wondered if Lois Pettigrew’s gesture was on the order of cheap theatrics. The late Matt Jardine knew St. Anthony of the Desert as the shingles saint: Patron Saint of Skin Disorders. The late Matt Jardine remembered the St. Anthony of the Desert laminated prayer cards mailed to their home at seemingly coordinated times from members of his wife’s Feldspar Catholic clan. Teri Feldspar-Jardine’s family hubs clustered in Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Madison. Though lapsed, Teri Feldspar-Jardine was deeply woven, whether she liked it or not, into the holy skein of things. Totems and plastic statuary collecting dust, inviting dust. Votive candles. Laminated prayer cards. Easier to just accept them. Easiest of all to re-gift the St. Anthony of the Desert laminated prayer cards whenever one or another of Teri Feldspar-Jardine’s nine siblings crossed at intervals into their fifties and got hit with shingles. …

Read award-winning fiction from emerging and established Wisconsin writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction.

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The late Matt Jardine blushed. Was Lois Pettigrew presenting The Temptation of St. Anthony to him as a gift? She did wrap the book, more or less, in a tightly tucked white plastic bag with the Piggly Wiggly logo marginally obscured. The Temptation of St. Anthony was simply on loan from the Mudstone library. Lois Pettigrew, it turned out, had a grad school lit-crit bug up her butt about Gustave Flaubert’s misunderstood masterpiece.

“Fuck Madame Bovary,” said Lois Pettigrew, more than once, and at least once in the dining hall within earshot of pretty much everyone. “Bovary is mere shadow play,” she said. “Its light filtered and repressed. Dimmed, as naturalism so often is. Devoid of spiritual anguish. The Temptation, by contrast, is unrepressed. Unfiltered.”

“Unplugged?” said the late Matt Jardine.

“Michel Foucault called The Temptation the ‘coal’ from which all of Flaubert’s works are smelted.”

“Really? Smelted? What does that even mean?” …

There were times, the stillest of times, the quietest, when Joy Frisk’s most absent thoughts inadvertently filled with memories of her husband, the late Soren Frisk. Joy Frisk remembered their move to the woods and taking ownership of Mudstone. Cancer in remission. The relocation from Chicago met with strong resistance from her doctor, Reese Malamud, and from her aromatherapist, Connie Boone. …

The late Soren Frisk painted the walls of Joy Frisk’s tree house therapy-den a shade of white that Joy Frisk called Ingmar Bergman white. With dove grey trim. The late Soren Frisk painted the walls of the Cinémathèque a subliminal shade of mud, the color, said Joy Frisk, of “absence recollected in repose.” …

During his final days, the late Soren Frisk lived with a tank of oxygen lashed to the back of his wheelchair.

“Absence it ain’t,” said the late Soren Frisk. “Seems instead like a lot of add-ons.” …

And then he was gone. …

“John Huston directed The Dead on oxygen and in a wheelchair,” said Joy Frisk at the late Soren Frisk’s Mudstone memorial service. “Soren Frisk defied the dead on oxygen and in a wheelchair.”

“Defined?” asked someone, sotto voce.

“Defiled?” asked another. …

“Addictions and obsessions are self-perpetuating in a recognizable—comfortable—pattern,” said Joy Frisk in February when winter depression (SAD was a common Mudstone disorder) took hold among many who were staying there. “Absence is the alien god.”

“Please, no,” said Lois Pettigrew. “I know where you’re going with this. I mean, we’re all pretty well familiar with the books with which you’ve personally—with extreme prejudice—stocked the Mudstone library. Elaine Pagels. Hans Jonas. Too much Gnosticism, too little to meet our anxieties with anything but a kind of regal darkness. No, thanks.” …

On those Wednesday evenings during the summer when Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine were together at Mudstone, they would sometimes ride with Joy Frisk in her roughrunning Volvo to the Creamery Grill in Tempest. Joy Frisk had a fortune-telling gig as the Veiled Seer.

It usually worked like this: Joy Frisk would announce mid-afternoon on a Wednesday that she was visiting her chiropractor thirty miles away in Tempest, a community close enough to Hayward to share in its nightlife and tourism. Joy Frisk would casually dispense a couple of discount coupons for dinner and a show at the Creamery Grill. Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt

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Jardine thought, Why not? It would be a night out. Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine were initially on the same page in discouraging any thought of the evening as a “date.” Nor was much privacy or intimacy afforded them. At 8:00 pm the Creamery Grill house lights dimmed and the Veiled Seer took to the small raised stage. The Veiled Seer’s job was to warm up the crowd before the folksingers and the oldies cover bands. …

There was the time the Veiled Seer pointed a lacy-gloved finger at Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine. Like a metronome needle sweeping back and forth between the two of them. The Veiled Seer said, “This relationship is toxic.”

Rude laughter erupted from the Creamery Grill crowd.

A lemon wedge hit the late Matt Jardine in the face. …

Shouldn’t a restaurant with a name like the Creamery Grill serve a seafood chowder rich with dairy cream instead of their decidedly more austere broth-like seafood chowder? You can see right through this. Soup is not chowder. Pimento and celery are not seafood. This was a topic of dinner conversation between Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine.

“From our lips—” said the late Matt Jardine, soup spoon sluicing with not much of anything.

“—to God’s crushing indifference,” said Lois Pettigrew.

They shared idiot grins. …

Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine honestly couldn’t swear that Joy Frisk was the Veiled Seer on each of the three occasions that they attended the show. The Veiled Seer was thoroughly wrapped in ghostly white linen from head to toe. One Wednesday night the Veiled Seer answered every question with, “I predict you will continue to enjoy our two-for-one drink special.” …

Joy Frisk detoxed from Vicodin the week that the late Matt Jardine biked the lake trail to the grotto across the water from Mudstone.

Secluded in the tree house therapy-den, Joy Frisk vaped hash oil and flushed her system with raw fruit juice and Metamucil.

Joy Frisk detoxed from Vicodin the week that the late Matt Jardine biked the lake trail to the grotto across the water from Mudstone. Secluded in the tree house therapy-den, Joy Frisk vaped hash oil and flushed her system with raw fruit juice and Metamucil. …

St. Anthony of the Desert emerges intact from his battle with demons of self-doubt, of distraction, of psychic sabotage.

Imagined by Gustave Flaubert as an IMAX hallucination of rapacious pagan gods and violent worldly excess giving way to Christian austerity. Rather than traumatized and depleted by the experience, St. Anthony of the Desert radiates giddy health and well-being. An object lesson in giving others permission to likewise seek the path of solitude. That is, navigating difficult separations from spouses, children, relatives, friends, business associates and creditors. …

I was otherwise preoccupied, dosing myself once again with blood pressure beta-blockers when the late Matt Jardine biked to the far side of Mudstone Lake. It made sense to go back on the meds while the late Matt Jardine was off-site. I’d worked myself into knots shadowing Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine for signs of desire. We all know the signs. …

“Care—or, rather, optimization—of the self is post-human,” Joy Frisk told us around a spectral winter campfire. “Self-monitoring of vital signs is a trillion-dollar tech industry. There’s a lesson here: Let us burrow into our cells.”

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“Cells?” said the late Matt Jardine.

“Or cells?” said Lois Pettigrew.

“Sales?” said Earl Conklin. …

Joy Frisk told us that the late Soren Frisk’s cremation ashes were converted into a small memorial diamond at a cost of five thousand dollars. As a consequence, said Joy Frisk, she was as good as broke. The five-thousand-dollar memorial diamond had a market value of less than three hundred dollars. …

The late Matt Jardine locked eyes with Lois Pettigrew across campfire flames. …

Lois Pettigrew was forceful in calling it a night. But it seemed to Earl Conklin that while Lois Pettigrew and the late Matt Jardine exited the clearing separately a few moments apart, they were nevertheless distinctly in sync. A dance of feigned resistance and disinterest masking deep inward agitation. Or what some might call desire, thought Earl Conklin. We all know the signs.

The late Soren Frisk tumbled fifteen feet to the ground while reinforcing the tree house therapy-den deck railing after a rain.

…

“The way to insure writing becomes essential to your life,” said Joy Frisk to Lois Pettigrew, “is to sanctify the process.” …

The late Matt Jardine wanted an escape from plaque psoriasis.

Purification. The late Matt Jardine wanted to lose his skin.

What is the reverse of stigmata? Something, like fasting, that melts flesh like candle wax rather than defacing or mutilating it. He’d read somewhere, Googled it: psoriasis is skin working overtime. …

Earl Conklin was convinced that desire was consuming the late Matt Jardine like a wasting disease. Burning out the rheostat. We all know the signs. …

“I suppose, yes, it was a signal,” said Lois Pettigrew.

“Locking eyes,” said Joy Frisk.

“Yes,” said Lois Pettigrew.

“Locked eyes. Fixation. Idolatry.”

“Really just a cue.”

“To skidoo?”

“To screw,” said Lois Pettigrew. “We were outside in February around an ineffectual campfire.

You were talking about Soren Frisk’s cremation ashes. Matt Jardine and I said our goodnights individually and then met up back at his cabin. Earl Conklin was spying on us again. We hid beneath blankets.”

“Absence requires resolve,” said Joy Frisk. …

Joy Frisk was off Vicodin. …

Joy Frisk was back to feeling her bones abrading. …

Joy Frisk was back to grinding her teeth. …

“Since you aren’t working on the book you thought you came here to write,” said Joy Frisk, “I’d like you to help me write my next book.” …

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Joy Frisk’s earlier book, her first book, was a cancer memoir titled I Should Be Dead. Earl Conklin was profoundly moved by a paperback copy of I Should Be Dead that he browsed in an Eau Claire gas-station convenience store. Copies of I Should Be Dead, both new and used, are available for loan or purchase in the Mudstone library.

CHELE ISAAC the understory

…

Lois Pettigrew was genuinely surprised when Joy Frisk asked for her assistance on a book project. …

Joy Frisk said she wished to clear her head of what had become a flood of memories or sense impressions haunting her absencetrained mind. …

The late Soren Frisk tumbled fifteen feet to the ground while reinforcing the tree house therapy-den deck railing after a rain.

The late Soren Frisk’s workbench broke his fall. Broke his back.

Punctured a lung. …

“The process protects us,” said Joy Frisk. “But it also limits our access to absence.” …

“Precision and harmony are the key.”

“The key to what?”

“Swedish woodworking.”

“Fine. Is that your opening? Your preface?”

“Swedish woodworking isn’t just wooden shoes.”

“Of course not. Who really thinks otherwise? I wasn’t at all thinking wooden shoes. I don’t think your readers will think wooden shoes.”

“Clogs, actually.”

“I’m done.”

OPENS SEPTEMBER 2 FREE ADMISSION 227 STATE STREET mmoca.org Chele Issac: the understory (video still), 2017. Seven-channel video with sound. Courtesy the artist.

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Bob Wake lives in Cambridge. His short stories have appeared in Rosebud Magazine, The Madison Review, Madison Magazine, and, previously, in Wisconsin People & Ideas. Wake blogs at coffeespew.org.

IN THE WORLD w w w. r s b d . n e t

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Poetry

Congratulations to Our 2017 Writing Contest Winners Winners receive awards of $500 to $100, publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas, and a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. First-place winners in both categories also receive a one-week writers’ residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts & Crafts in Mineral Point.

FICTION WINNERS 1st

2nd

3rd

POETRY WINNERS 1st

2nd

3rd

Bob Wake

Jeff Esterholm

Ann Zindler

Nicholas Gulig

Hansa Kerman Pistotnik

Georgia Ressmeyer

Cambridge “Mudstone”

Superior “The Hardest Part”

Waukesha “The Rescue”

Fort Atkinson “The New American Nostalgia”

Madison “Salvation Doesn’t Come”

Sheboygan “Time Speeding Up”

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS “Invisible,” Louis V Clark III – Omro “Lessons,” Elena Norcross – Appleton “Guy AR,” Nathan D Dotterweich – Appleton “Garbage Goat,” Jonathan Hakes – Appleton “Wished,” Katie Futrell – New Berlin

Join us at 5:30 pm on Friday, November 3, in Madison for a 2017 Wisconsin Book Festival reading with our contest winners.

“Old Dish,” Sylvia Cavanaugh – Cedar Grove “ At the Abandoned Lumberjack Cemetery,” Thomas J. Erickson – Whitefish Bay “The Suitcase,” Elisabeth Harrahy – Oconomowoc “ After You’re Struck By a Semi While Playing the Good Samaritan,” Shoshauna Shy – Madison “When the Great War,” Dominic Holt – Monona “On the Anniversary of Her Son’s Suicide,” Mary C. Rowin – Middleton “My Mother’s Kitchen,” Kathryn Gahl – Appleton “The First Time I Enter a Ladies Restroom with My Daughter,” Annette Grunseth – Green Bay “Daily Reminders,” Paulette Laufer – Sturgeon Bay

Thanks to our 2017 contest sponsors:

Thanks to our 2017 lead contest judges Alex Bledsoe (fiction) and Melissa Range (poetry), as well as to preliminary contest judges CX Dillhunt and John Lehman. All contest judging is done blindly, and the winning submissions are selected on criteria established by individual judges.

WISCONSIN

BOOK

F E S T I VA L

NEW CONTESTS OPEN SOON! Fiction and poetry submissions accepted Sept. 1 – Dec. 1, 2017 for our next contest. Send in your best work to win cash, prizes, and more.

Details and online submission at wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

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New Wisconsin Poetry

The New American Nostalgia The election happened and now you’re driving north.

November freezes in the birch trees. The fields have nothing left. In Wisconsin where you pass them the hills go rolling autumn through the cold.

You’re home again. The edges of the clouds turn gray. You change the station of the radio.

Near Osseo, a V of geese blend thin against the skyline and retreat. You change the radio again. The news is everything at once, then nothing. A whitetail pauses in the grass. Later, you’re sitting at a wooden table with a friend. A man you’ve known for half your life, he’s hacking at a turkey leg. The democrats, he says.

The republicans, you say. In kitchen-light the field beyond the window fills with snow and cattle, the early blue of evening. Look, he says, they’re lonely. All of us are lonely. On the radio, Miles Davis sends a distant trumpet through the house.

Your memory erases you and makes you over.

When you were younger, lying in his room at night, lying on the carpet, it used to be the two of you, the dark surrounding you. The music pushing homeward through the song.

Nicholas Gulig

J U D G E’S N OTES

Melissa Range

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“The New American Nostalgia” is a tightly crafted and accomplished poem that speaks to our current American moment of talking past each other, rather than connecting, particularly in the realm of politics. The poem’s lines ebb with a confidently subtle iambic cadence, while vivid imagery of the natural world and shifting sounds from the radio provide a textured, and fleeting, background for the speaker’s loneliness. Every moment in this poem aches; even “[t]he fields / have nothing left.” I was gut-punched by this line in particular: “Your memory erases you and makes you over.” Beautiful.

Poetry

Town and Country To leave the city, leave with an open hand. You should have said it sooner. As though the land itself demanded that you take your body and return it, as though a wilderness demanded. There is something west of center you have it in you to retrieve. The world, your father said, returns whatever word you take your mouth and make around yourself by speaking of the places where the names you love are buried. It is human to imagine. If there were another way to say I am, or if the here in which you are belonged to something else less visible beyond you, there would appear a path of matted grass behind you through the scrub brush. Miles are like years. Even when it’s off, what’s actual is accurate, a growing field that helps a person put her hands into the garden every summer among the insects and the dusklight and the rain. Because the Chippewa is a mispronunciation of something Indian that ended, and the Eau Claire is not a river that remembers clearly, miles under Canada you tell your daughter when she asks you how the sky could ever guide her inward into care, that no north truer than the north which empties in the white wind asking at the edges of a mouth to be believed will ever lead her anywhere but somewhere quiet she can keep. Home, you’ll say, is where the river breaks and spring is insignificant until the snowmelt pushes back the floodplain. Even in Wisconsin, the unused fields go clear in early light the farthest hills will never have it in them to forget. The part of wilderness that’s possible, or else the forest you have asked into your hands like something empty you can love because the people and the places you return to, tired of the person you became, can make a territory matter. What’s modern is what’s explained. When you’ve been gone for long enough to listen— ebbing voices, the dry grass—knowing they belong because you took a life and placed them there, the maps you always needed become inaccurate and the two good eyes you close together every time you aim them north are for believing you are small. The space between the noises of the city helps you to remember that you do this. The noises of the country help. And all the words for sky you’ve learned that fall apart within assisting also, an echoing among the buildings and the tall grass breaking back and forth and breaking, no matter which direction moves you. It is hard to have a god. To talk the dead land back into a clearing, to hold it where the mercy hurts. You, too, are often weakened by the spaces left between the things you say and the need you feel to say them plainly. You see this absence everywhere, in the river, in the cities, in the fields, a distant figure distributing the water, the kind and killing rain.

Nicholas Gulig

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. Educated in Montana, Iowa, and Colorado, Gulig earned a Fulbright Fellowship to Bangkok, Thailand, in 2011. His published works include the book-length poems North of Order and Book of Lake. He lives in Fort Atkinson and teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater.

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Poetry

Salvation Doesn’t Come Exhausted, this light.

It was supposed to shine piercingly bright set the roof ablaze melt the fire escape spark mica in the wall singe a rat’s whiskers in its hole.

But side-swiped by a taxi door window-slammed off discount store it launched from hood of truck in a stream only to be mugged by vent steam and spun around by high-rise draft it had hoped to dance on park grass, but punch-drunk, paled out diffused it filtered and fell confused in a dumb-luck daze through the curtains of 6A landing in the trust of particles of dust where it was pacified with gentleness— Stupified, this light is of no consequence.

Hansa Kerman Pistotnik

J U D G E’S N OTES “Salvation Doesn’t Come” is a thoughtful meditation on the kinds of experiences we actually have— ordinary ones—rather than the ones we all wish we had (momentous! earth-shattering!). The poet uses the metaphor of light-as-religious-epiphany in surprising ways (light is “mugged by vent steam” and falls “confused in a dumb-luck daze”); it takes real imagination and skill to pull this off in a new way, and the poet delivers. I admire the way this poem chimes with subtly playful assonance and rhymes, and I admire even more its religious sensibilities.

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Poetry

Poems They dignify bemoan illuminate analyze galvanize complicate or oversimplify misconstrue and glorify they lampoon exploit and supplicate but in truth most of them ignore they do all these and more but make no mistake— for as long as there ever are deserts for as long as there ever are hearts for as long as there ever are treasures glimmering sparks from distant shores poems do not stop wars.

Hansa Kerman Pistotnik

Hansa Kerman Pistotnik is a poet and photographer whose black-andwhite Hancock High, Lake Shore Drive was printed in the 2017 Midwest Review. Her poems have been published by Madison Metro Bus Lines Poetry and the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. She lives in Madison with her husband and her cat.

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Poetry

Time Speeding Up Life may not be as bleak as it seems.

The hurried seasons—spring, summer and fall—may plow into winter’s caboose, send it vamoosing.

Usually winter sits on a side rail out back not moving an iced-up muscle.

Now and then we poke it with a shovel, but that accomplishes nothing.

Why not bribe the other seasons to get their sluggish cousin leaving?

We hate watching them glide so swiftly past, but if they can budge winter off his snowy ass, their haste won’t be wasted.

After all, the faster winter makes tracks, the sooner spring can fill the gaps.

Georgia Ressmeyer

J U D G E’S N OTES “Time Speeding Up” is Dickinsonian in its playful sounds and its wry look at the changing seasons.

This poem offers a vision I’d like to see more of (in poems, and just in general): “Life may not be as bleak as it seems.” There are some wonderfully bouncy rhymes in this poem (I love “caboose” and “vamoosing”!), and there’s a lot of juice in this poet’s diction. I was charmed by the wit in this poem and delighted by the poet’s own delight in the natural world.

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Poetry

This is a Puzzle This is a puzzle that cannot be solved.

It is made of words—but what are those?

Lines of nuns in black, marching across a white marble courtyard charged with making order out of random smears of thought that otherwise might arrange themselves as cake-frosting or sauces on sleeves and cuffs— lickable art to those who have the stomach for it, sources of embarrassment to others, aggravations to most. Which category describes you best?

I would frame and hang it on the wall as abstract art, she wrote—but quickly crossed this out when nuns arrived with buckets and brushes to clean her up. No one must know she spills or drags her thoughts through dinner and dessert, that her mind is sometimes slop.

March, march you words in tidy rows across the court, cloister yourselves inside thick walls of books, do not splatter food or paint in lurid colors. Someone is watching, someone in black and white who detests messes and chaos. Is that someone Someone—or is it you?

Georgia Ressmeyer

Georgia Ressmeyer is a Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and recent recipient of the Honorable Mention award in the Council for Wisconsin Writers' Lorine Niedecker poetry contest. Her new poetry collection, Home/Body, is due out in 2017 from Pebblebrook Press. Originally from New York, Ressmeyer now lives near Lake Michigan in Sheboygan.

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Review

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

by Dan Egan W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $27.95 Reviewed by Jane Elder

Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is a new and important addition to contemporary books that tell the complex story of the one of the world’s most important freshwater ecosystems. An award-winning reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Egan has written about environmental conditions in the region for fifteen years. His well-researched Great Lakes series of articles have consistently probed the layered factors that drive losses in water quality and habitat.

Egan’s book reveals what is happening below the surface, which is one of the least visible and most ecologically significant sagas of the Great Lakes. He charts the human actions that have altered the ecological integrity of the lakes, from the construction of the Erie Canal to the expansion of the St. Lawrence Seaway—what Egan calls the opening of the “front door” to generations of invasive and exotic species. Egan describes how invasions and intentional introductions of species such as the Pacific salmon (chinook and coho) have disrupted and sometimes destroyed natural food webs, taking lake trout and other native species to the brink of collapse.

Because Egan tells the story of the Great Lakes as a journalist, he can convey fairly complex elements in ways that are still accessible to a non-expert reader. Making the connection between hydrology and broader environmental conditions, Egan takes on the complicated relationship between lake levels, dredging, geology, and the cumulative impacts of historic management decisions. Through interviews with many of the key players behind actions that have shaped the current (and future) state of the lakes, Egan reminds us that humans can both hurt and help this living system, one that spans 95,000 square miles and embraces 6 quadrillion gallons of water.

Egan takes the reader through the ways in which ocean-going and inter-lake shipping bring ballast-water hitchhikers—zebra and quagga mussels, spiny waterfleas, round gobies, and hundreds of others—into the lakes. The book also examines potential “back door” invasions through the Mississippi watershed via the Chicago Sanitary canal, and just how tenuous the current strategy is to keep destructive Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes.

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Any thorough book on Great Lakes environmental conditions would be incomplete without a discussion of algae and phosphorus pollution. Egan’s investigation of the 2014 Lake Erie crisis unravels the many factors leading to the toxic Mycrocystis algae that in turn triggered the August shutdown of Toledo’s drinking water supply.

On the banks of Lake Erie just east of Toledo, Ohio, Egan describes seeing a beach “smothered in sludge so thick it killed the two-foot waves rolling in from the north before they could hit the shore.” The thick sludge wasn’t the potentially deadly Microcystis that caused the Toledo shutdown. But Egan notes that this blue-green algae that looked like “rotten creamed spinach” was “yet another symptom of a lake that has been knocked dangerously far out of balance.”

As a passionate champion of the Great Lakes, I have a bookshelf filled with Great Lakes books. Dan Egan’s is among the best of them. In his closing chapter, as Egan considers what it would take to advance “a Great Lakes revival,” he harkens back to the wisdom of Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to promote the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

I agree with Egan when he observes, “Perhaps that’s as good a place as any to start.”

Jane Elder is executive director of the Wisconsin Academy and founding director of both the Sierra Club’s Great Lakes program and the national Biodiversity Project. She has served on several projects related to advancing the goals of the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Review

Scriptorium: Poems

by Melissa Range Beacon Press, 78 pages, $18.00 Reviewed by C. Kubasta

Melissa Range’s newest collection of poems, Scriptorium, brings together what seem to be disparate elements: medieval religious manuscripts, Old English literature, “hillbilly” stories from East Tennessee. They will come together—but you have to spend some time in this book, the title of which means “a place for writing” in Latin.

A 2015 National Poetry Series Winner and author of another collection, Horse and Rider (2010), Range teaches English at Lawrence University in Appleton. Her Scriptorium, which garnered her the 2015 award, is bursting with surprising language and imagery that flickers and flits from poem to poem.

Is this a monk mumbling over his pot of pigment, his brush bent?

Or is it some celebrated hero of myth, explaining the ways of God? No, it’s a father in one of her Appalachian poems, “Flat as a Flitter,” fixing strip-mining equipment, “everything / to him an innocent machine in need.”

For a taste of Range’s talents, one need only look at her pigment poems, each named for a color compound used to decorate the kind of sacred manuscript one might find in a scriptorium: verdigris, Kermes red, Tyrian purple. “Lampblack” is an excellent example; each word calls for its own attention, so the end rhyme swirls within the mix of all the other sounds, a cacophony; each bit of language seems brand-new, burnished. It begs to be read aloud.

properly be “quell”—we want to quell doom—but here the color lampblack is in the quill, used to write. (Perhaps writing is how we quell doom.)

Range draws words from her world—wainscot, ofermod, Schlitz— to pepper these poems, many of which feature undulations of form, sound, and sense. These are tangles meant to be untangled. The key to understanding how this all works together—these colors and considerations of God and (un)belief, this history of growing up in East Tennessee where the dialect holds traces of Old English—may be found in the revelatory title poem, which comes near the end of the book.

Like any good story, a good collection of poems has its own narrative arc, building through its inciting event and complications to its climax and resolution. In “Scriptorium,” we meet Eadfrith, the Anglo-Saxon monk who illuminated (illustrated) the Lindisfarne Gospels, perhaps the first and greatest masterpiece of medieval European book painting. The poem describes Eadfrith gathering his materials for this masterpiece, and how “The earth, not the cell, / is his scriptorium.” The poet could be talking about herself, about all poets.

Black as a charred plum-stone, as a plume from a bone-fire, as a flume of ravens startled from a battle-tree—this lantern resin the monk culls from soot to quill the doom and glory of the Lord won’t fade.

Multiple layers of sound seem almost visible: “plume” rhymes with “doom” (as the form demands), but also echoes “plum” and “flume.” Look how “culls” and “quills” mock each other in line four: to cull means to select from a larger quantity; “quill” should more

C. Kubasta is the author the chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s, and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015). She is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and serves as assistant poetry editor with Brain Mill Press.

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

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Review

The Power of Story A Centennial Celebration with NPR’s Ari Shapiro

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