Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer/Fall 2020

Seeds of Change The food and philosophy of Chef Elena Terry

Wisconsin Idea in the Arts • Warfarin • Writing Contest Winners

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Editor’s Note Most days, I sit at the table on our screened-in porch and work. The spot affords me a nice view of our late-summer garden and, now that online school has started, the kids are too occupied to bother me much.

I realize the privilege I have in working from home, and I’m also grateful to have a job at time when many arts and culture organizations are struggling to survive. This struggle might seem minor when compared to the massive societal problems we face at the moment. But ask any of the 100,000 or so people working in and around the arts in Wisconsin—a third of whom are currently unemployed due to the Covid-19 pandemic—and you will see the struggle is real.

At just over $10 billion, or 3.1% of Wisconsin’s GDP, you might think that the arts and culture sector is doing pretty darn well. But, like many local restaurants and small businesses also hit hard by the pandemic, arts organizations operate on relatively thin margins. Partly because Wisconsin offers very little in the way of public funding for the arts (we rank dead last in the U.S.), there is little if any safety net for arts organizations. As such, many ushers, concessions workers, graphic designers, and administrators, as well as people we typically think of as “the talent,” have been furloughed or let go from their jobs.

If you feel moved to help, near-term aid can come in the form of purchases of artwork, gift certificates, commissions, and online event tickets, as well as through donations that support artists and arts-related staff. Long-term solutions are more difficult. One approach to the crisis is to advocate for more public funding for the arts; another is to expand our awareness of the role the arts have played in shaping the Wisconsin we know and love.

In this issue we encounter many people and organizations that have worked over the past century to cultivate the arts and creativity across our state. One of the unsung heroes of this tale is UW Extension, which was responsible for countless projects and programs—“Let’s Sing” and “Let’s Draw” on WHA-FM, the Rhinelander School of the Arts, the Wisconsin Idea Theatre, and the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program—that worked to improve the creative lives of hundreds of thousands of residents. Perhaps you are one of them.

However, it’s important to note that these projects and programs are greatly diminished or gone. I was especially saddened to learn of the recent suspension of the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program, which suffered from the Walker Administration’s dismantling of UW Extension, only to fall to pandemicrelated budget cuts at its new home in the UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies.

But it’s not too late to help WRAP or the thousands of out-of-work arts industry professionals. If we commit today to making both near- and longterm investments in our creative economy, we can build upon—rather than walk away from—our proud history of supporting the arts in Wisconsin.

Patrick Stutz Photography

WISCONSIN ACADEMY

OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Chef Elena Terry on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Also known as Spirit Lake, or Ta-wa-cun-chuk-dah, the lake is located on a broad swath of Ho-Chunk ancestral lands that run across southwestern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Photograph by Tom Jones.

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CONTENTS Ann Baldwin/iStock Photo

01 Editor’s Note 04 From the Director 05 Letters 06 Happenings Wisconsin Table

10 Seeds of Change Candice Wagener

Essay

16 Wisconsin Academy in the Arts Jody Clowes

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Essay

22 The Clot Thickens:

Warfarin’s Journey from Poison to Medicine Jacqueline Houtman

Essay

30 Looking Back to Look Ahead: The Wisconsin Idea in the Arts Maryo Gard Ewell

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Robin Jebavy, Set Table (Amber), 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 63 by 38 inches.

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Lyssa Seefeldt/University of Wisconsin Extension

VOLUME 66 · NUMBER 3/4 SUMMER/FALL • 2020

Report

38 Natural Climate Solutions Catie DeMets

@ Watrous Gallery

44 Four Exhibitions, Deferred Jody Clowes

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

Copyright © 2020 by the Wisconsin Ac a d e my of S c i e n c e s , A r t s a n d Letters. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor

Fiction

54 “Junk Shed” • 1st-Place Contest Winner

JEAN LANG copy editor

Jacquelyn Thomas

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader

Poetry

64 Poems • 1st- through 3rd-Place Contest Winners

JODY CLOWES arts editor

Susan Martell Huebner, Kathryn Gahl, Dominic W. Holt

HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

Book Reviews

71 Maids: Poems, by Abby Frucht Reviewed by Karla Huston

72 In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams,

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by Thomas Davis

twitter.com/WASAL

Reviewed by Gary Jones

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

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

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

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From the Director

There was a particularly sage observation I once heard from my undergraduate psychology professor. I can’t remember the specific lecture in which this observation arose, but it has stuck with me for years: “One of the signs of good mental health is the ability to tolerate ambiguity.”

And, oh, the ambiguity we are all living with right now.

Whatever habits of mind we have that enable us to deal with uncertainty, discomfort, grief, fear, and weariness are certainly getting a workout in 2020. Some days it is an act of courage just to get out of bed.

Of course, no one knows what lies ahead. But we can be sure it will be different from what we’ve known. Gazing in to the chasm between the known and unknown can be disorienting and terrifying.

But it can also be exciting when one considers the opportunities for transformational change.

The environmental author and educator Dorothy Lagerroos once observed that, during the Early Middle Ages, no one really knew what the Renaissance would look like, or even that it was coming. But, at a certain point, social and political change was rapid and transformative as bold new ideas about art, science, and culture swept across Europe. Of course, the Renaissance didn’t just “happen.” The seeds of change—the invention of the printing press, an emerging merchant class—were planted long before they flowered.

Yet all too often vast economic and social change happens on the backs of the vulnerable and oppressed. In modern times, the term “Luddite” is often used as derogatory shorthand to belittle those who fear progress. But the original early 19th-century Luddites were artisan weavers who smashed British textile factory machines because they understood the impact automation would have on their lives and livelihoods. As the violence grew, with Luddites burning down factories and exchanging gunfire with company guards, it became clear that nothing could stop the coming Industrial Revolution. After a few Luddites were shot and killed in a raid on a mill in Huddersfield, the rest were rounded up by troops and transported to Australia—or hung.

Indeed, history shows us that change is rarely simple or linear. It was, and always will be, unpredictable and messy. While the human capacity for imagination and adaptation is remarkable, I wonder if we are at the cusp of another social transformation today—or just living through a few tough years. Have the seeds of justice, equity, and sustainability been awakened from their slumber? Can we lift ourselves—all of us—into a tomorrow that is more just, more humane, more beautiful? Whatever may happen, I’m certain future historians will have much to write about this particular American moment.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

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Letters

News for Members Welcome to our double issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Many thanks to Academy members for their continued support as our staff strives to maintain a safe work environment while continuing to publish the magazine and develop other Academy programming.

ENVIRONMENTAL BREAKFAST SERIES Join us this fall for our virtual Environmental Breakfast Series as we explore how Wisconsin leaders are moving beyond incrementalism to transformational action at the intersections of climate, public health, and environmental justice.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/EBS to register for this free series or to view archived programs.

CALL FOR CREATIVE WRITERS Our annual Fiction & Poetry Contests will begin accepting submissions on January 15, 2021. For more details and to read the 2020 contest-winning submissions, visit wisconsinacademy.org/ contests. Join us for a weekly live video reading series on Facebook that features winners from our annual contests. Be sure to follow Facebook.com/ WisconsinAcademy to receive notifications of these live readings.

U.S. POET LAUREATE EVENT POSTPONED We were scheduled to welcome U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to Madison in conjunction with the 2020 Wisconsin Book Festival in October.

Due to the Covid-19-related closure of Overture Center, her visit has been postponed until October 21, 2021. More details about our event with Joy Harjo can be found at wisconsinacademy. org/JoytoWI.

NEED A GIFT IDEA? With the holiday season right around the corner, share your love of Wisconsin with a Wisconsin Academy gift membership—which includes a one-year subscription to of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/membership to learn how you can give the gift of Academy membership.

A Facebook message from Robert Albee, one of the early founders and organizers of WOJB–FM, brought to our attention a few errors and some elements of the radio station’s history that were missing from our feature article by Jude Genereaux, “A Different Drum,” in the Spring 2020 issue. While this isn’t the whole story of WOJB, with Albee’s help we are pleased to shed more light on those early days of the station.

The story of how WOJB came to be began with a 1977 Federal stimulus package initiated by then-President Jimmy Carter. Robert Albee, who had founded Minnesota radio stations KFAI and KMOJ, was working at Twin Cities Public Television when he saw in these federal funds an opportunity to establish a new radio station from scratch.

While searching for possible projects, Albee received a phone call from Larry Leventhal, a renowned attorney working on tribal issues who was also the attorney for the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Tribe in northern Wisconsin. Leventhal asked Albee if he would like to help bring radio to the LCO reservation, whose residents had no telephone service and mainly communicated via CB (citizens band) radio.

Leventhal connected Albee with LCO leadership—Gordon Thayer, Richard St. Germaine, and James Schlender Sr.—to lay the groundwork for a radio station they hoped would connect not just members of the tribe but the entire Northcentral Wisconsin community. Albee and Thayer wrote and received a federal grant to develop a media program for student tribal members at LCO High School and for a follow-up program at UW–Stevens Point for documentary video as well as radio.

The idea was to create a new generation of media-savvy LCO youth.

However, as Albee worked to plan and build the station, he and the LCO leaders quickly realized they would need some immediate help to get it off the ground. They approached local anti-mining activist and community organizer Sandy Lyon to develop a volunteer corp. Lyon would go on to be WOJB’s first program director.

Walter Bresette, a Red Cliff member doing radio broadcasts for other stations at the time, became the first news director. Before station manager Dick Brooks, there was David McKay, whom the station had recruited prior to Brooks to train tribal high school members, as well as Catherine Joy (Bresette’s wife), who through her work doing economic development for the state helped raise funds and attention for the station. Gren Hall was the first station manager at WOJB, and a host of other volunteers filled in other functions at the fledgling station well before the days of Brooks, Paul DeMain, and Eric Schubring. The station went on air on March 1, 1982.

Albee says that the station didn’t come about in response to the conflicts over hunting and fishing treaty rights, as the article suggests. But, rather, the conflict brought their mission as a bridge between the tribal and non-tribal communities into sharper relief.

He recalls how even though Larry Leventhal and the two spearfishers who were arrested for exercising their treaty rights on tribal land took their case to the U.S. Supreme court and won, many white protestors were still outraged. Albee says WOJB created a place for “dialog rather than a fistfight.” That was—and is today—the genius of WOJB. “When we let the bigots speak, they dig their own holes.”

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happenings

Karen Ann Hoffman

Wayne Valliere

Two Wisconsin residents recently have been named National Heritage Fellows by the National Endowment for the Arts: Karen Ann Hoffman of Stevens Point and Wayne Valliere of Lac du Flambeau. America’s highest honor for folk and traditional artists, the National Heritage Fellows award recognizes artistic excellence and extraordinary contributions to our nation’s traditional arts heritage.

A member of the Oneida Nation, Hoffman is being recognized for her Iroquois raised beadwork, which is characterized by lines of beads that arch above the textile surface for a three-dimensional effect. Hoffman uses raised beadwork to produce contemporary art such as vases, pillows and placemats. She often incorporates her tribe’s history into her work, and teaches this traditional form in Wisconsin and nationally.

Valliere has been building traditional Oneida birchbark canoes since he was a boy. A member of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe tribe, he’s one of only a handful of Native birchbark canoe builders in the United States today. Valliere is being recognized for both his dedication to his craft and for carrying forward his culture by teaching traditional arts such as canoe-building at schools and through apprenticeships.

Hoffman and Valliere were selected from a field of 100-plus nominations to receive the 2020 awards, which, in addition to the public recognition of their excellence, provide recipients a one-time payment of $25,000.

Hoffman and Valliere join the ranks of eight previous National Heritage Fellowship recipients from Wisconsin, including Sidonka Wadina, a Slovak wheat weaver and egg decorator from Lyons (2015); the Oneida Hymn Singers of Wisconsin (2008); and Ron Poast of Black Earth, who plays and builds Swedish fiddles in the style of the Hardanger region (2003).

Including the 2020 class, the Arts Endowment has awarded 449 National Heritage Fellowships, recognizing American artists working in more than 200 distinct forms.

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N EW WRITI N G CENTER When Write On, Door County artistic director Jarod Santek and managing director Lauren Bremer led the groundbreaking ceremony for their new Writing Center in August 2019, the two never imagined that the grand opening the following year would be virtual.

Since 2013, Write On, Door County has been hosting visiting writers in its primary residence, a converted home just outside of Fish Creek, as well as holding writing classes and workshops at local schools and libraries, community centers, and prisons. The new Writing Center, which opens October 9, 2020, will both deepen and widen the impact the nonprofit has on the local and national literary community.

Featuring a large gathering space for writing classes, workshops, and presentations, as well as a book-making station, the new center also provides dedicated office space for Santek, Bremer, and other staff whose offices were located on the main floor of the primary residence.

In their quest to be, as Bremer says, “locally loved and nationally recognized,” Write On will continue to host one- to four-week residencies for visiting writers from near and far to hone their craft alone and with each other while connecting with the Door County community at large. According to Santek, the residency is popular because of the cozy accommodations, 39 wooded acres, and, perhaps most importantly, a high acceptance rate. Unlike many residencies, Write On isn’t genre exclusive, and Santek and Bremer encourage applications from writers of all stripes, even literary arts administrators.

But you don’t have to be working on the next Great American Novel to take part in the the dozen or so monthly virtual workshops and events Write On, Door County currently offers for little to no cost. Open to the public, the virtual opening of the Writing Center on October 9 will feature video tours of the space, special readings, music, and other fun events. Learn more at writeondoorcounty.org.

Lauren Bremer

N AT I O N A L H E R I TA G E F E L L O W S N A M E D

happenings

Clint Thayer/UW–Madison Dept. of Medicine

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

Dr. Nasia Safdar (2020) has been selected as the Association for Professionals in Infection Control’s 2020 Distinguished Scientist. The award recognizes prominent researchers and scholars who have made outstanding contributions to the science of infection prevention and control. An internationally recognized leader in healthcare-associated infection prevention research, Safdar has been the medical director of infection control at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics since 2009 and is the associate chief of staff for research at the William S. Middleton VA Hospital.

Ian D. Duncan (2009) is the recipient of the 2020 John Dystel Prize for Multiple Sclerosis Research. A neuroscientist and Professor of Neurology at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, Duncan received the award for his groundbreaking research on how myelin (the protective nerve coating in the brain and spinal cord) is damaged, particularly in multiple sclerosis, and how it may be repaired. Given jointly by the National MS Society and the American Academy of Neurology, the Dystel Prize was established by the late Society National Board member Oscar Dystel and his wife, Marion, in honor of their son, John Jay Dystel.

Neuroscientist and mindfulness pioneer Richard J. Davidson (2004) is offering a series of free YouTube meditation videos to help people deal with the stress and anxiety surrounding COVID-19. Davidson is the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at UW–Madison and Healthy Minds Innovations, an affiliated nonprofit that uses science to cultivate and measure well-being. Since early April 2020, Davidson and five other instructors (including one who teaches in Spanish) have been leading half-hour classes that are posted to their YouTube channel and Healthy Minds Program app every Monday. Davidson says that the classes can help participants “learn to be present more fully, learn to appreciate what it is we have in front of us.”

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Tom Jones

Wisconsin Table

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Wisconsin Table

SEEDS OF CHANGE

BY CAN D I CE WAG EN ER

T

he big, bumpy Pueblo Hubbard Squash is one of Chef Elena Terry’s favorite ingredients. It’s the star of one

of her signature dishes, a dessert she calls SassSquash, in which she pairs the rich flavor of the Pueblo Hubbard with tart wild cranberries and smoky maple syrup to create an entirely new flavor profile. Terry, who is Ho-Chunk, draws on her deep knowledge of traditional Indigenous ingredients to create accessible dishes like SassSquash that both satiate and educate.

Ho-Chunk Chef Elena Terry cups ancestral corn seeds in her hands. Terry is a leader in a movement known as Native American food sovereignty, which strives for the return of traditional Native American foods and the Indigenous management of food systems while rebuilding relationships with the land, water, plants, and animals that sustain life. Photograph by Tom Jones.

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Wisconsin Table

Working with food keeps Terry close to the Ho-Chunk stories and traditions of her ancestors. She runs a catering business, teaches classes on how to cook Indigenous foods, and does pop-up dinners once in a while. But she also spends time foraging in the woods or at her farm just outside of Wisconsin Dells, where she grows, prepares, and cooks her ingredients as closely as possible to the traditional ways. At planting time, for instance, Terry puts down an offering of tobacco in the field while giving thanks and saying a prayer for the food. Traditional practices such as these are a good reminder of “the importance and reliance [we] have on these [foods] and the connection they give to our ancestors,” says Terry. “There was a lot of work done before we were even on this earth to make sure we had these ingredients.”

Terry says that her love of traditional Ho-Chunk foods was learned from her grandmother. Some of her earliest memories are of helping her grandmother carefully butcher and dry wild game—deer, turtle, rabbit, and muskrat—and reveling in that one-on-one time together. She also fondly recalls the larger gatherings with her cousins, especially during the annual corn harvest.

Her grandmother’s home would be set up in stations, with everyone gravitating to their favorite spot, whether it was husking, cooking, tending the fire, or taking kernels off the cobs to dry them on homemade screens. During meal breaks, there would be talking and laughter while everyone enjoyed soup and bread made over the fire.

“It was a connection we didn’t realize was being established as children,” admits Terry. “And now as we’re older, those lessons on how to care for the food and how to treat it correctly still resonate.”

This notion of treating food correctly is how Terry got involved in the food sovereignty movement, which strives to assert more local control over food systems by rebuilding relationships between communities and food growers and providers who use sustainable and ecologically sound agricultural practices. She found that many of the tenets of the movement were already central to her Ho-Chunk beliefs and practices, and she quickly became involved with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA). Through NAFSA Terry discovered the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, a group that harvests and shares seeds from ancestral fruits and vegetables. The seed keepers ensure that culturally important seeds are preserved, talked to, and treated with incredible care so they will provide for future generations. Terry, who has been keeping seeds for years, notes that some seeds can be traced to families or individuals going back hundreds of years.

Terry describes how “seed keepers know the origins of our ancestral seeds—seeds that have made the journey with our ancestors through the [tribal] removals, seeds that have survived for centuries without being cross pollinated, seeds that have provided for our ancestors in times when we didn’t have access to our resources.”

For Terry, seeds represent both the past and the future of her people. In the spring, she travels to Native American-owned farms both near and far to deliver seeds for planting. In the fall she returns to the farms to chart growth patterns and discuss soil compatibility or row spacing with the farmers. Often she demonstrates how to use harvested ingredients, drawing on her knowledge of the unique flavors that can be found in the same plant grown in different regions. She’s even worked with the UW–Madison’s Seed to Kitchen

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For Elena Terry, seeds represent both the past and the future of her people.

Collaborative to grow and assess various types of ancestral corn for organic crop production in Wisconsin.

Terry does all this because she understands that the sustainability of these Indigenous crops increases with each farmer she meets, with each recipe she shares, with each partnership she makes. “When you do this, especially when it comes to our Indigenous ingredients, it offers a support network that will hopefully guarantee that these ingredients will be there for future generations—they’ll be appreciated in a way that will preserve them for the future.”

For Terry, food is as essential for the spirit as it is for the body.

It’s not just something you get in a box at the store but, rather, a way to nurture and connect people from all walks of life. “Regardless of whether it’s Indigenous food or farm-to-table food, it’s a way to strengthen the community,” she says.

Terry spent the first ten years of her career in the restaurant industry, learning about the business while developing an appreciation for her own contributions—her unique influences, background, and knowledge about food. In 2017 she was working as a trainer at the well-known BBQ chain, Famous Dave’s, and feeling like it was time to shift gears. She got an extra nudge from friend and fellow seed saver Jessika Greendeer, who encouraged her to apply for a new Culinary Mentorship Program sponsored by the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.

“At the time, I was thinking if I made it into the program, I would commit to doing what I thought I needed to in my community to promote food sovereignty, and do it in a positive way,” says Terry, who was one of four chosen to participate in the inaugural program, which offered Terry the chance to work with some well-established Native American chefs. The mentorship brought her to the Intertribal Agriculture Council’s “Great Lakes Intertribal Food Summit” at the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama, Iowa. It was the first time Terry had seen so many Native American chefs in one place, and she made a commitment to attend as many summits as possible.

At a later summit in Mashantucket, Connecticut, she learned how to process and cook fresh seafood alongside well-known Native

WDNR

Murphy_Shewchuk/istockphoto

lisinski/istockphoto

Elena Terry

threespeedjones/istockphoto

Wisconsin Table

Some common foraged and farm-raised Indigenous ingredients used by Chef Terry (clockwise from upper left): milkweed pods, Pueblo Hubbard squash, ancestral seed corn, chokecherries, wild rice.

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Wisconsin Table

team. So far, ten of the 26 participants have gone on to find longterm employment.

“It’s been a beautiful thing to watch the people who have been committed to the program since the beginning become really confident cooks,” says Terry.

This mentorship model echoes her ancestors’ way of teaching through apprenticeship, and of offering pathways back into the community for those who have strayed. Wild Bearies does this with a steady paycheck, practical experience, and a sense of family. In the Wild Bearies kitchen, questions are encouraged, mistakes are expected, and mentees are required to stay positive because, as Terry always says, their attitude is reflected in the meals they make.

The catering element of Wild Bearies gives Terry and her mentees the opportunity to practice and teach Native American food sovereignty with the greater community in a delicious and accessible way.

During FarmAid 2019, Wild Bearies set up a food stand offering wild rice bowls with fresh roasted vegetables, cedar tea, and three sisters soup, a traditional recipe containing hominy, beans, and squash.

They also participated in the inaugural Femmestival event, a celebration of womxn, femmes, and nonbinary entrepreneurs, artists, and producers, held at Garver Feed Mill in Madison, serving both sweet berry and savory wild rice bowls. At an event at Ho-Chunk Casino last November, Terry and her team turned an entire section of the buffet into an Indigenous foods station with bison meatballs, wild rice, roasted root vegetables, and a blue corn-based dessert.

Nicole Miller/UW–Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

American chefs Sean Sherman, a James Beard Award winner, and Brian Yazzie, the co-founder of Intertribal Foodways (an Indigenous food catering company). During another summit in Taos, New Mexico, chef Loretta Barrett Oden (host of CreateTV’s “Seasoned with Spirit”) encouraged Terry to use the Pueblo Hubbard squash to make something truly amazing—which she eventually did.

In addition to offering a wealth of experience and connections to other Indigenous chefs, the mentorship program provided Terry with a small grant to create an event focused on food and community. Understanding the role of mentorship in her own career, Terry decided to use her grant to mentor other aspiring chefs. Taking a cue from outspoken Indigenous food advocate and chef, Brian Yazzie, whom she worked with at Mashantucket, Terry established Wild Bearies Catering in 2018.

Through Wild Bearies, Terry combines her desire to promote native food sovereignty with a means to mentor people in the native community who have suffered trauma from alcohol and drug abuse. By creating a supportive, non-judgmental environment in her kitchen, Terry hopes to reincorporate these people back into the tribal community while teaching them important life skills.

Mentees are asked to make a commitment that includes recorded kitchen hours, food preservation hours, community outreach hours, and gardening and harvesting hours. Once mentees have shown they can handle their given responsibilities, they receive a chef ’s coat symbolic of the discipline and dedication required to be part of the

At a Fall 2018 event hosted by the Intertribal Agriculture Council and the UW–Madison Department of Food Science, Terry (center) demonstrates how to prepare, roast, and puree squash for use as a topping on traditional hominy and wild rice puddings.

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During that same month they were also able to incorporate one Indigenous menu item at each of the casino restaurants.

During all of these events, her mentees build their personal networks and relationships with other tribal members and the public. In February, Terry and her Wild Bearies team partnered with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Ho-Chunk Nation for the 2020 Hunter’s Feast. Chef Yazzie, one of Terry’s mentors, and Chef Crystal Wapepah from California built the menu with the Wild Bearies mentees, who got to meet chefs, nutritionists, hunters (who donated game and fish), and other members of the community, who are all bringing their knowledge and traditions to the Native American food sovereignty movement.

Seeing her mentees working with all these committed people was a full-circle moment for Terry, who had just been named the Food and Culinary Program Coordinator at NAFSA. It was just a few years earlier that she got her own first break as a NAFSA Culinary Mentorship Program participant, and now she would announce the opening of the next round of the program. But what touched her even more was how many different people made the journey to this significant gathering: representatives of the Shawanda family from Great Lakes Culture Camps in Ontario, the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative of Iowa, and the Montana-based Intertribal Agriculture Council were all in attendance. Some of the Oneida ancestral seed savers also came and brought their corn to share.

“The intention was always to have [Wild Bearies] expand into a stronger network, to support our ancestral ingredients, and to build these relationships,” says Terry. “It was a real blessing, to share the kitchen energy, those ancestral foods, and the nourishment with each other.”

For Terry, her passion for sharing her ancestral food traditions while building a healthier community and planet keeps her going strong. “It’s truly rewarding to see my community have an interest in this. If I’m just a small piece of the puzzle to make that happen, I’m really blessed. I couldn’t be more grateful to be on this journey and have these foods around me.”

Candice Wagener is a freelance writer who loves talking about everything and anyone involved with food. Wagener lives in Middleton with her husband and two boys, whose energy and humor make every day an adventure.

SassSquash Shared with us by Chef Elena Terry of Wisconsin Dells, this recipe has three parts that come together to make a delightful dessert that serves twelve.

Squash Filling 1 squash (Pueblo Hubbard, butternut or other squash varieties) 3 tbsp flaxseed meal ½ cup water ¼ cup maple syrup or sugar maple 1 large spoonful of pie spice (ground cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg) Pinch of salt Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut the squash in half, remove seeds, cover with foil, and roast for 1 hour. After it has cooled, spoon squash into bowl with combined water and flaxseed meal. Add mixture, maple syrup, spices, and salt to food processor and blend until smooth.

Crust 2 cups whole walnuts ¼ cup of almond flour 2 tbsp sunflower oil Pulse whole walnuts in a food processor and add almond flour and sunflower oil until mixture becomes crumbly. Empty mixture into a 9-by-9-inch pan and press it firmly with hands or bottom of a cup. Pour cooled squash puree into the crust and spread it evenly. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and let cool for 1 hour (cooling will solidify the puree).

Cranberry Sauce 1½ cups frozen cranberries ¼ cup maple syrup 1 cup water 1 large pinch of pie spice (ground cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg) While squash puree and crust are baking, combine cranberries, water, and maple syrup in a saucepan and simmer on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until cranberries soften and release pectin to thicken the sauce. Once sauce has thickened, remove from heat and strain through a fine mesh sieve, discarding solids.

To Serve After the filling and crust have cooled for 1 hour, cut into 12 even pieces and drizzle them with the cranberry sauce and additional maple syrup before serving.

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Wisconsin Academy in the Arts

BY J O DY CLOWES

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hile cocooned at home during this coronavirus pandemic, I have spent

hours on my laptop engaging with art. I’ve raised a glass at online receptions, tuned into social media for studio tours, explored the digital collections of the Rijksmuseum and the Forbidden City, and visited dozens of virtual exhibitions. Just keeping up with local online arts activity is a challenge, never mind what’s happening in Detroit or Shanghai.

The cover of the Spring 1983 issue of Wisconsin Academy Review (today’s Wisconsin People & Ideas) featured a fold-out reproduction of Warrington Colescott’s 1982 large color intaglio print, The Hollandale Tapes: The Court Is Now in Session. As an Academy Board member in the 1980s, Colescott actively encouraged and contributed to the Academy’s work in the visual arts.

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Aaron Bohrod created this graphic for the Wisconsin Academy Review in 1958. Bohrod was an Academy member and the second artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, succeeding renowned rural landscape painter John Steuart Curry in 1948. Bohrod was the Wisconsin Academy Review’s first arts editor, and his work was reprinted on the cover several times. The Academy’s James Watrous Gallery mounted a major retrospective of Bohrod’s work in 2007.

While the Academy was well known among high school students and educators for its Junior Academy science fairs, throughout the late 1970s to the early 1990s it also published various collections of photography and creative writing by high school students. Each year a juried selection of student work from these publications was laminated and exhibited at participating schools across the state.

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While immersing myself in virtual art has truly been a lifeline, more than anything it reminds me of what is missing from the digital realm. I miss standing before a large painting or print, engulfed in a wash of color, or slowly walking around a sculpture, sensing its gestural push and pull. I miss the grain of wood, the tooth of paper, the dense gloss of varnish and enamel. I miss the play of light and shadow, and the seductive call of a work of art from across the room.

The technical wizardry of a 360-degree VR video just can’t match the rich sensory experience of sharing space with art.

The pandemic also has me thinking about the fragility of small regional galleries, museums, and art centers, and how easy it is to take them for granted. These places form the backbone of local art communities. Yet they are tenuous institutions, especially in a state like ours, where public arts funding is so thin on the ground.

I’ve worked at the Academy’s James Watrous Gallery for over a decade, but until recently I hadn’t really appreciated the long years of advocacy, fundraising, and hard work that led to its 2004 grand opening at Overture Center for the Arts. I spent much of the last year knee-deep in the Academy’s archive, researching the history of this remarkable organization in preparation for our 150th anniversary exhibition, Collections & Connections. This project gave me great respect for the many dedicated Academy members and supporters who never gave up on the arts.

Most state academies are devoted to the sciences alone; only Wisconsin’s, Michigan’s, and Utah’s include the arts and letters as well. But while the Wisconsin Academy’s founders appear to have felt strongly about this interdisciplinary principle back in 1870, in actuality the organization saw virtually no art activity for nearly a century. To be fair, the Academy’s founding directive for “the encouragement of the fine arts and the improvement of the public taste” leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Still, while a number of Academy members were instrumental in shaping the Milwaukee Public Museum and State Historical Museum, there’s nothing to suggest direct Academy support for art in museums or anywhere else for many decades.

It took nearly eighty years after its founding for the Academy to give more than lip service to the arts. The lack of activity is partly

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because for the first one hundred years the Academy was a learned society without an office or any space where art could be displayed.

Walter and Trudi Scott, who launched and edited the Wisconsin Academy Review (today’s Wisconsin People & Ideas) from 1954 to 1963, made a point of including short notices about the arts and recruited the artists Aaron Bohrod and Frederick Logan to select cover images for the quarterly magazine. Although Bohrod fretted that it was hard to find “good paintings of a vertical nature” to fit the Review’s format, he and Logan selected work by significant figures like Robert Grilley, John Wilde, Gibson Byrd, Warrington Colescott, and Santos Zingale, as well as art educators from around the state and amateur painters associated with the Wisconsin Rural Arts Program.

Unfortunately, the Scotts’ efforts to publish art ended when a new editor took over the magazine in 1963. In those days, the Academy was still an all-volunteer organization, and expanding its work and its audience were goals that always seemed just out of reach.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, after a generous bequest made it possible to buy an office building and hire a small staff, that new pursuits could take root.

Throughout the next decade, the Academy bubbled with fresh activity. James Batt, its first executive director, was determined to “breathe new life into the arts and letters.” He had the enthusiastic backing of Academy Board member Robert Gard, who had long been a strong proponent for an inclusive, democratic approach to the

arts. With their leadership, the Academy embarked on an ambitious series of public lectures and conferences, produced a “Wisconsin Arts Report” for Wisconsin Public Radio, and developed a series of art and creative writing programs for high school students around the state. The Academy also began to host art exhibits in its new office building, a modest structure on University Avenue near the UW–Madison campus.

It’s hard to imagine how Batt squeezed them all in, but the first exhibit in the Academy’s small lobby included one hundred wood engravings by Frank Utpatel, a Mazomanie artist best known for his illustrations of H.P. Lovecraft’s novels. Many of the exhibits Batt organized in those early years appear to have developed through chance or personal connections. They became more systematic after 1976, when Gard enlisted Wisconsin Rural Arts Program director Mary Michie to organize a regular rotation of exhibits.

Michie envisioned an artist-managed gallery for the Academy, and, although surviving records don’t describe how the exhibits were coordinated or artists selected, it’s clear that the space was in high demand. While its 1970s décor—textured earth-tone wallpaper, low shag carpet, and a large, polished brass chandelier—wouldn’t pass muster today, the Wisconsin Academy Gallery soon became a fixture of the Madison arts scene.

By 1979, artist Kay Hawkins had assumed the role of gallery coordinator, working closely with Pat Powell, the new editor of the Review. Powell initiated a series of art-themed issues, offering

Since the 1950s, the Academy’s publications have consistently championed the work of Wisconsin artists. Here a self-portrait by Madison artist Jerry Butler graces the cover of the Spring 2000 issue of Wisconsin Academy Review. A traditional Hmong story cloth from the collection of Elizabeth and Daniel Perkins in Eau Claire is featured on the cover of the Spring 1992 issue.

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the magazine’s first in-depth coverage of the visual arts in almost twenty years. With support from artists John Wilde and Warrington Colescott, who were on the Academy’s board, Powell’s focus on art infused the gallery program with new energy. Wilde, Colescott, Hawkins, and Powell joined with Margaret Rahill, Bill Weege, and Joseph Bradley to form the first official gallery committee. One of their first orders of business was to commit to a monthly rotation of exhibits and a formal application and jury process. They also began hatching plans that would take curated shows beyond the walls of the Wisconsin Academy Gallery.

Their first project was the 1983 exhibition Wisconsin Painters and Printmakers, curated by artist Marylou Williams. Featuring work from forty celebrated Wisconsin artists, it was the Academy’s most ambitious art project to date—and it was far too big for the small gallery in the Academy’s lobby. Instead, Wisconsin Painters and Printmakers opened at Beloit College’s Wright Art Center, which hosted the Academy’s annual meeting that same year. The exhibit then traveled to the Memorial Union at UW–Madison, the Charles Allis Museum in Milwaukee, and UW–Platteville’s art gallery.

By 1985, the gallery committee had expanded to include representatives from around the state, adding Jane Brite, Janet Ela, John Mominee, and Alex Vance, along with stalwarts Williams, Hawkins, and Powell. This group initiated a second traveling exhibit called Wisconsin Survey: 3–D Art Today, which featured the work of another forty artists. Again too large for such a small venue, the second group show took a seven-venue tour of Madison, Neenah, West Bend, La Crosse, Platteville, Green Bay, and Manitowoc while the Wisconsin Academy Gallery continued to showcase works by a new artist every month. As someone who has been organizing exhibitions for many years, I can attest that shipping, installing, and promoting these traveling shows was a monumental undertaking, especially for a small group of volunteers.

Members of the gallery committee also turned their attention to renovating the Academy’s gallery space, which sorely needed a makeover. To raise the funds, John Wilde donated a series of prints, and Nancy and Robert Burkert created posters for sale. In addition, three donated works from the curated Wisconsin Masters exhibitions were auctioned off. By late 1986, the Academy had raised enough money to install new track lighting, and, within a few years, clean white walls and new carpet replaced the textured wallpaper and low shag. By establishing a regular exhibition schedule, consistent arts coverage in The Academy Review, and a greatly improved gallery space, these vigorous committees built a solid reputation for the Academy as a trusted resource for cutting-edge Wisconsin art.

In the early 1990s, painter Sally Hutchison assumed the role of gallery coordinator; by 1995, she was billed as co-director with another painter, Randall Berndt, who soon took a leading role.

During this period, the gallery began hosting curated exhibits on

historic art and architecture, including a retrospective of illustrator Maginel Wright Barney, an exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanism, and two exhibitions of historic maps from the collection of the late George Parker. The gallery also continued its focus on solo shows, and, despite a desperate shortage of parking and lack of signage, its reputation for excellence attracted a steady stream of visitors. The long list of artists who’ve exhibited in the Wisconsin Academy Gallery comprises a virtual who’s who of contemporary Wisconsin art: Carol Emmons, Charles Munch, Sonya Clark, John Hitchcock, Martha Glowacki, and Leslie Vansen, to name just a few.

I became a regular visitor to the Wisconsin Academy Gallery soon after I arrived in Madison, and I was consistently surprised and impressed by the caliber of work on view in such an unassuming space. In 2004, it was a deep pleasure to witness the new team of Martha Glowacki and Randall Berndt translate the Wisconsin Academy Gallery’s program into a format suited to the new James Watrous Gallery, and to watch it blossom in its new home at Overture Center for the Arts. A long-time professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, James Watrous was a respected printmaker and muralist, as well as a driving force behind the university’s Elvehjem Museum (now the Chazen). The gallery was dedicated in his name and takes inspiration from a lifetime of providing encouragement and opportunity to Wisconsin artists.

With its hardwood floor and wide, curving windows, James Watrous Gallery may be more elegant than the tan wallpaper-and-shag rug space of the past, but our mission to bring people together to explore and celebrate Wisconsin art remains much the same as it was decades ago.

There’s no end to the exciting work created by Wisconsin’s artists, and we plan to continue to share their works with audiences for years to come. It will be a great day when we once again can open the doors of the James Watrous Gallery to visitors ready for that full-on, sensory experience of art.

Jody Clowes is the director of the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery. She has years of experience developing and curating exhibitions, running gallery programs, and writing about art through senior positions at Milwaukee Art Museum, Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery, and UW– Madison’s Design Gallery. Clowes and her family have called Madison home since 1994.

Postcards made to promote exhibitions at the Wisconsin Academy Gallery and arts features in The Academy Review reflect a variety of influential Wisconsin artists and their works over the years.

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THE CLOT THICKENS WARFARIN’S JOURNEY FROM POISON TO MEDICINE

BY JACQ U ELI N E H O UTMAN

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n 2001, Del Bolin suffered a pulmonary embolism, a potentially deadly blood clot in his lung.

During Bolin’s treatment, his doctor discovered that Bolin had a rare condition that makes him prone to blood clots. Bolin was prescribed warfarin, an anticoagulant drug with an interesting history.

Karl Paul Link (right), the biochemist who discovered warfarin, and Mark A. Stahmann (left) perform a laboratory procedure at the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station in 1949.

UW Digital Collections/ID S05108

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Sometimes called a “blood thinner,” warfarin doesn’t actually affect the thickness of blood. Instead, the drug helps prevent the coagulation of blood, a complex cascade of biological processes the body uses to prevent an excess loss of blood from a cut or wound to the skin. However, when these coagulation processes go awry—within the veins, lungs, or brain, for example—the results can be fatal.

Now 78, Bolin lives in La Crosse and drives a disability van part time for Gundersen Health. Because he continues to take warfarin, he is less likely to develop another life-threatening clot. But he needs to be careful. Because of the way warfarin inhibits coagulation throughout his body, just a minor bump can cause bruising, and a hard blow could lead to internal bleeding. Even simple tasks, such as shaving or making dinner, are done with caution. “I’ve cut myself a couple of times over the years,” he says. “I bleed like a stuck pig.”

When Del Bolin compares himself to a bleeding farm animal, it is an apt image. The story behind the discovery of warfarin—one of the most prescribed drugs in the world—began on a farm in St. Croix County with a dead cow, a milk can full of blood, and a hundred pounds of sweet clover.

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key player in the story of warfarin is sweet clover, which grows readily in the cold climate of the upper Midwest. Brought to Colonial America from Europe in the 1600s, the bush-like Melilotus officinalis and M. alba have been used for centuries as livestock forage. Farmers in the Midwest would often harvest, dry, and store the clover to feed cattle over the winter months. However, during especially damp years the hay became contaminated with molds such as Penicillium nigricans and P. jensi. Cows fed this moldy sweet clover hay grew stiff and refused to move, often developing large bruises and blood in the urine, feces, or milk. Eventually they died from uncontrolled bleeding. The condition, common in the Midwest during the 1920s and 1930s when farmers couldn’t afford to discard moldy hay, became known as “sweet clover disease.”

Thinking the dicumarol anticoagulant would have a clinical use for clotting disorders, Link patented it with the help of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in 1941.

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On a cold Friday in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, St. Croix County cattle farmer Ed Carlson lost two cows to sweet clover disease. He had lost three cows earlier that winter, and he knew his bull would be next, as it was bleeding from the nose. The next day, Carlson loaded a dead cow, a milk can full of its un-clottable blood, and a hundred pounds of sweet clover hay into his pickup truck and drove from his farm through a blizzard to the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. As it was Saturday, the campus Agricultural Experiment Station was closed. After trying a few locked doors, a frustrated Carlson discovered an open door that led him to the lab of biochemist and professor Karl Paul Link.

Carlson found a sympathetic audience in Link. But the biochemist said there was little he could do but advise Carlson to throw out the spoiled hay and attempt blood transfusions on the remaining affected cows. Link later recalled how “those 190 miles of drifted roads between our laboratory and his barn must have appeared to [Carlson] like a treacherous and somber ocean.”

Link’s graduate student, Eugene Wilhelm Schoeffel, was incensed that his boss didn’t do more to help Carlson. Running his hands through the unclotted blood Carlson had left behind, Schoeffel pointed out that Carlson’s remaining cows were in danger because the farmer couldn’t afford to feed them anything but the spoiled hay.

In fact, Schoeffel railed, until the problem of sweet clover disease was solved, thousands of cows across the state were in danger.

“Let me tell you something,” said Schoeffel as he grabbed Link by the shoulders and demanded action, “there is a destiny that shapes our ends!” Before they closed the lab for the evening, Schoeffel had convinced Link to focus his lab’s research on the cause of sweet clover disease.

Link, along with Schoeffel and his other students, began a six-year effort to identify the hemorrhagic agent responsible for sweet clover disease. At the time, Link was already studying sweet clover, seeking a more palatable strain with low levels of a bitter compound called coumarin. Coumarin, as Link discovered, is transformed by the molds in spoiled sweet clover hay into another compound called 3,3’-methylenebis-(4-hydroxycoumarin) that reduces the level of prothrombin—an essential component for coagulation—in the bloodstream. In bringing his research interests together, Link had found the cause of sweet clover disease.

Link dubbed the newly discovered compound dicumarol, and he and his team began to synthesize more than 150 slightly different versions, testing their anticoagulant properties in laboratory rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens. They found that different species varied in their sensitivity to dicumarol, and that the compound affected animals differently if they were fed or fasting. Perhaps most importantly, the team discovered that dicumarol’s anticoagulant effect on the animals could be counteracted by providing them with additional vitamin K. The role of vitamin K in the clotting process was discovered not in bleeding cows, but in bleeding chickens. Less than a decade earlier, Danish scientist Henrik Dam found that chickens fed a severely limited diet would bleed uncontrollably. Like the cows afflicted with sweet clover disease, the chickens suffered from a deficiency of prothrombin. Dam later identified the missing nutrient that could

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restore the clotting function and dubbed it vitamin K after Koagulation, the Danish/German word for “coagulation.”

Physician and coagulation research pioneer Armand Quick of the Marquette University School of Medicine, who had developed a laboratory assay of blood’s clotting ability, noted in 1936, “Both sweet clover disease and vitamin K deficiency emphasize the importance of prothrombin depletion as a primary cause of hemorrhage.

These diseases furthermore demonstrate that the prothrombin of the blood can be diminished either by the action of a toxic substance or through the lack of an accessory food factor.” Indeed, the action of the dicumarol compounds is intimately linked to vitamin K; these compounds today are classified as vitamin K antagonists.

Thinking the dicumarol anticoagulant would have a clinical use for clotting disorders, Link patented it with the help of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1941. WARF had been established in 1925 to manage professor Harry Steenbock’s patents related to vitamin D. As an independent nonprofit corporation, WARF continues to manage patents and uses the revenue to fund research at UW–Madison.

Clinical studies at the Mayo Clinic and Wisconsin General Hospital demonstrated that dicumarol was not toxic and was indeed effective at inhibiting clotting in humans. An editorial in a 1941 issue of the medical journal Lancet sang dicumarol’s praises, calling it a “rival” for heparin, the primary anticoagulant in use at the time.

Undated photo of an experiment in Link’s lab showing the effects of sweet clover disease in poisoned hay. After six years of work, researchers in Link’s lab isolated the compound responsible for the disease and named it dicoumarol.

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Dicumarol was less expensive and could be administered orally, whereas heparin needed to be given intravenously.

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UW–Madison Archives/ID S16314

n 1945, after a rainy canoe trip, Link suffered a reactivation of the tuberculosis he had contracted as a student in Switzerland.

He spent six months resting (and social distancing) at the Lake View Sanatorium, which is now the site of the Dane County Department of Health and Human Services. “Here I was supposed to vegetate like a topped carrot,” Link recalled. “[I] kept the aged tuberculosis out of my mind by studying laboratory records and reading the history of rodent control from ancient to modern times.” He recalled from his research how rats and mice were the most dicumarol-sensitive of all the species they had tested and decided that dicumarol—or one of its related molecules—would be an effective rat poison. He had his students re-test the compounds and found that rats were especially sensitive to compound Number 42. It was patented in 1945, again with the help of WARF, and dubbed “warfarin” in honor of both WARF and coumarin. The new compound would be, as Link called it, “a better mousetrap.”

Warfarin was marketed as a rat and mouse poison under several brand names, including d-CON. Leonard Lee Ratner, the founder of d-CON, advertised the product heavily in newspapers, over the radio, and, later, on television. Advertising was first aimed at agricultural markets, because rats caused millions of dollars in grain losses for farmers. Ratner also organized a very effective demonstration in Middleton, a Wisconsin town with a serious rat problem at the time. Beginning on November 4, 1950, d-CON rodenticide was distributed free to Middleton residents, and two weeks later there was not a rat to be found.

Warfarin was wildly successful as a rodenticide, in part because it is odorless but also because it kills slowly. An article in Sponsor

magazine described how warfarin overcame the problem of bait shyness. “When other exterminators before Warfarin were tried, the clever rodents soon learned to stay away from the bait that was cutting down their numbers. … This product is so insidious that rodents never learn what is killing off their relatives.” As reported in the Peoria Heights Herald, “The rats and mice continue to eat and gradually become sleepy, walk more slowly, and finally die painlessly of internal hemorrhage.” (How the author knew the level of pain the animals perceived is a mystery.)

Since it was quite effective as a rat poison, warfarin was surely deadly for humans—at least that’s what a depressed 22-year-old army recruit thought. Determined to kill himself before being deployed to fight in the Korean War, he consumed a small amount of warfarin on March 26, 1951. Nothing happened. Still determined to kill himself, he tried again the next day. Nothing. Over the course of six days, he consumed an entire four-ounce package of the rat poison (which amounted to a hundred times the therapeutic dose). He then experienced pain in his back and abdomen, which continued to worsen until he was admitted to the U.S. Naval Hospital with vomiting, nosebleeds, and a rash over much of his body. After several blood transfusions and doses of vitamin K, the recruit physically recovered and was soon released. The physicians who treated him noted that, “Accidental [warfarin] poisoning of an adult is almost inconceivable. Taking the drug for suicidal purposes would require marked perseverance and a continued desire, lasting over several days, to die.”

The failed suicide attempt and its successful treatment with vitamin K demonstrated the relative human safety of warfarin, and further studies of the compound showed that it was more potent and faster-acting than dicumarol. Considering the reluctance of the public and medical community to associate a well-known rat

Attendees at the 1954 Farm and Home exhibit examine Link’s display showing the effect of warfarin on rats.

Photograph by William Wollin.

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poison with a human medication, a more soluble form of warfarin was licensed in 1954 with a different name: Coumadin. If there was any doubt of the efficacy or safety of Coumadin, it was surely wiped away when President Dwight D. Eisenhower began taking the drug following a heart attack in 1955.

Today, warfarin is one of the most frequently prescribed drugs in the United States. It is used to treat people with atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heart rhythm that can cause blood clots), heart valve replacements, and blood clots in the veins (deep vein thrombosis) or lungs (pulmonary embolism). It may also be prescribed to prevent blood clots and strokes after a heart attack. s with most drugs, warfarin affects the people who take it in different ways. Factors that can influence the body’s response to warfarin include age, body weight, other medications or supplements, and diet, especially vitamin K intake. Because of this high degree of variability, patients who take warfarin must be monitored.

After open heart surgery at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison to repair a defective valve, Barbara Walsh was prescribed a 90-day course of warfarin. Walsh was asked to submit blood every 1 to 4 weeks during her treatment for “prothrombin time” or PT testing to measure the time it took for her blood to clot. Originally developed by Marquette University’s Dr. Armand Quick in 1935, the PT test was plagued for many years with inter-laboratory variation: identical blood samples tested in different labs could yield inconsistent results. So, in 1983 the international normalized ratio (INR) was introduced to reduce inter-laboratory variability by comparing the patient’s actual PT with a standard PT. An INR of 1.1 or less is normal for healthy individuals, while an INR of 2 to 3 is considered ideal for patients taking warfarin. (An INR below 2 may increase risk for clots, and an INR higher than 3 could lead to excessive bleeding.) Frequent testing is required to keep the INR within the narrow therapeutic range.

After submitting her blood for INR testing, Walsh would get a call from her case manager at SSM Health’s anticoagulation clinic to discuss test results and adjust the warfarin dose, if necessary. Walsh might also get advice about dietary and lifestyle changes associated with taking warfarin: avoiding alcohol and vitamin K-rich foods like spinach and kale, and being careful of falls and sharp objects.

There are more than 3,000 of these specialized clinics nationwide with highly trained pharmacists and nurses on staff who determine how often patients should check their INRs, assess patients for bleeding or clotting conditions, and adjust warfarin doses to achieve desirable INRs. Anticoagulant clinic case managers also provide guidance about changes in medication or the warfarin dosages required for dental or surgical procedures. These clinics are essential not only in helping individual patients but also in lowering the overall costs of treatment and preventing the need for emergency intervention.

In addition to the many internal and external factors that must be taken into account when treating patients with warfarin, there is yet another factor that affects dosing—genetics.

In 1961, a 73-year-old man suffered a heart attack. Afterward, he was prescribed warfarin. PT testing showed that he needed 145 mg of warfarin per day to achieve the desired anti-clotting effect, a nearly twenty-fold increase over the average dose. Coinciden-

Everett Collection Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

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President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver after suffering a serious heart attack in 1955. Use of Coumadin (warfarin) soared after it was used to treat Eisenhower.

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Doctors such as Philip Trapskin, PharmD/BCPS, and Anne Rose, PharmD, from the UW Health Anticoagulation Stewardship Program (ASP) provide the highest level of care and the best possible outcomes for patients on antithrombotic medications such as warfarin, for which the therapeutic window is unique to each individual

tally, and unknown to him at the time, his identical twin brother suffered a heart attack the same week. The twin also showed an unusual resistance to warfarin, as did several other (but not all) family members. Clearly, warfarin resistance is hereditary. The authors of the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting the case proposed that the trait was due to alteration of a protein involved in the vitamin K-dependent production of clotting factors. But they didn’t know which of the thirteen distinct proteins involved in the multiple steps of coagulation were altered.

At around the same time, some wild rats and mice developed resistance to the lethal effects of warfarin. Link and his UW–Madison colleagues Mark A. Hermodson and John W. Suttie (who later elucidated the molecular function of vitamin K) obtained descendants of some resistant wild rats from Wales. They reached a conclusion similar to that of the researchers studying human resistance to warfarin: that a mutation altered a protein needed for production of clotting factors, making that protein less able to bind to warfarin and thus less able to be inhibited by it. While the altered protein was finally identified in these rats by researchers Alicia Zimmermann and John T. Matschiner at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1973, it wasn’t until thirty years later that the gene and mutations that confer warfarin resistance were identified.

The genetic variation described in resistant people and rats affects a protein called Vitamin K epoxide reductase complex 1 (VKORC1) that makes vitamin K available to help produce clotting factors. Normally, warfarin blocks its action, depleting levels of

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vitamin K and reducing clotting ability. Warfarin binds poorly to the altered protein, however, and higher doses of warfarin are needed to achieve ideal INR levels in people with VKORC1 variations.

Another protein affecting warfarin dosing is Cytochrome P450 2C9 (CYP2C9). Altered forms of this protein are less effective at metabolizing warfarin, a so the drug accumulates in the body. People with this genetic variation need lower doses of warfarin to keep their INR levels in the therapeutic range.

In 2010, the FDA recommended that patients be tested for the mutated proteins VKORC1 and CYP2C9 before starting on warfarin so the initial dose would be more likely to have the desired effect on INR. Although genetic testing has become cheaper and easier, it is not commonly used for warfarin dosing in Wisconsin due to the limited availability of timely testing. Even so, a study published in 2019 by Marshfield Clinic examined an existing database of genetic information from 749 patients and found it took less time for patients to reach a stable INR when these genetic variations were taken into account.

Scott Hebbring, a Research Scientist at Marshfield Clinic, points out that the use of genetic information to inform dosing would be especially useful for patients in rural areas who currently “need to travel an hour or two a day to get their INR taken, just to get them on their proper dose.”

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n 2010, the FDA approved the first new anticoagulants in more than fifty years. Called direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), these drugs—dabigatran, rivaroxaban, apixaban, edoxaban, and betrixaban—act on specific factors in the clotting cascade and are unaffected by vitamin K. In general, DOACs have a quicker anticoagulant effect than warfarin and are cleared from the body sooner. A major advantage of DOACs over warfarin is that they do not require frequent INR monitoring.

While studies comparing the effectiveness of warfarin and DOACs in various populations are ongoing, DOACs were added to the National Patient Safety Goal for anticoagulant therapy in summer 2019. “About half of the patients that were on warfarin have switched over to DOACs,” says Anne Rose, PharmD, who manages UW Health’s anticoagulation clinic. “DOACs are now the preferred treatment for patients with atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm that can produce clots. Warfarin, however, is more effective than DOACs in patients with heart valve replacements.”

Even with the advent of the lower-maintenance DOACs, anticoagulation clinics continue to be a vital resource, especially in light of new research that shows blood clots play a role in COVID-19. The new information makes the management of anticoagulants even more complicated. “That’s where we struggle,” says Rose. “We know that there is a tendency towards [COVID-19] patients having more blood clots. We are not really sure why. … Right now the big discussion is ‘How do you prevent those things from happening?’ ”

The challenge of preventing dangerous blood clots will go on, and warfarin will continue to play a key role. “There is still a place for warfarin,” notes Rose, “and I think there will always be a place for it.”

Warfarin has had a circuitous history, progressing from a feed contaminant to a rat poison to an important anticoagulant. No one appreciated the ins and outs of this story more than Karl Paul Link, who always enjoyed a colorful retelling of it in print and in lectures. Although Link is credited with warfarin’s discovery, he did acknowledge his students’ contributions. Many of them were war veterans, young men who “never ceased to wonder [and] kept on trying,” recalled Link. “They were on a project directed toward doing mankind some good instead of trying to destroy it.”

Although Link and his students couldn’t save Ed Carlson’s cows, through the discovery of warfarin they truly did do mankind some good.

Jacqueline Houtman is a freelance biomedical science writer and editor, and recipient of a WARF fellowship for the first year of her doctoral studies in Medical Microbiology and Immunology at UW–Madison. Her science writing for adults and children appears in many publications, and she has published two books for young readers, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas (Boyds Mills Press, 2012) and Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the March on Washington (with Walter Naegle and Michael G. Long, City Lights, 2019).

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LOOKING BACK TO LOOK AHEAD: THE WISCONSIN IDEA IN THE ARTS

BY MARYO GARD EWELL

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n October 3, 1914, over 4,000 people gathered in rural Sauk City to attend

the opening of a play. Written, organized, and directed by Ethel Rockwell, the University of Wisconsin Extension’s director of community drama, A Social Center Pageant promised attendees a day-long exploration of “a new movement in democracy” and a celebration of the city’s decision to adopt the local school as

Sauk Prairie Area Historical Society

its social and cultural center.

A crowd gathers around Sauk City High School as participants in Ethel Rockwell’s A Social Center Pageant move the town ballot box from City Hall to the high school in a gesture that represents the convergence of citizenship and education.

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Pageants featuring large numbers of costumed actors portraying historic moments, acting out morality tales, or even serving as a tool in city planning, were common at the time. Held outdoors, A Social Center Pageant included scores of local actors dedicated to the lofty principles articulated in the program. Foremost among them was the notion that government should no longer be “merely the selection of agents for repression, but … the all-inclusive and living fellowship of citizens in a creative process of self-education.”

A rapt audience followed the cast across town for scenes that took place in several different locations, culminating in a final act in which participants removed the community’s ballot box from the town hall and led a triumphant procession to the school house where it was installed. The interpretation of this symbolic gesture, according to a Sauk City resident who was there, was that the school would become the true “seat of continual learning and open inquiry.”

Then, as now, the country was roiling with cultural and political changes. W.E.B. DuBois was writing articles and books that probed the ways in which Black citizens were treated unfairly

by American systems and structures. The Settlement House movement was addressing ways that immigrants could be better assimilated into American culture. Congress had created the Cooperative Extension Service to work with state universities to improve the quality of rural life and economics. Meanwhile, urban officials were engaged in conversations about education reform, the condition of prisons, fair labor practices, and the roots of poverty. At the same time, large-scale industrial and technological advances, such as the automobile and electricity, began to widen the gap between “haves” and “have nots” and between urban and rural life. People were discussing what “democracy” meant in this new reality, and for the people gathered in Sauk City that day the question of the ballot box was not a trivial one.

A reporter from Harper’s Weekly, who traveled all the way from New York to cover the play, noted that its theme dealt with “the new theory that the business of citizenship and the business of education constitute one process.” That this event occurred in a tiny Wisconsin town was “as richly significant as the rifle shot at Concord or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

The play was truly an example of creativity in the service of big ideas. A Social Center Pageant also ushered in an era in which a set of beliefs shared by Governor Robert M. LaFollette and University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise would forever alter the artistic and cultural life of our state. These beliefs, collectively known as “the Wisconsin Idea,” were founded in a deep humanism and preached a gospel of the university as a body in service to the entire state. According to the Wisconsin Idea, innovation in sciences, arts, and letters was to be made available for use by all, and residents were encouraged to cultivate their special interests and latent artistic talents in pursuit of building better lives, and stronger communities. The ultimate purpose of all of this activity was the establishment of a high-functioning democracy that viewed “the state as an instrument for the well-being of all people” rather than just the privileged few.

A very big idea, indeed.

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thel Rockwell’s pageant was a foundational moment within a larger movement to apply the central tenets of the Wisconsin Idea to the arts. Her Bureau of Dramatic Activities, within UW Extension, freely loaned scripts to anyone in Wisconsin wanting to present a show, and Rockwell frequently made herself available to advise fledgling theatrical endeavors. Her colleague Thomas Dickinson, a professor in the University of Wisconsin English Department, was at the same time encouraging the writing and production of locally themed plays. Dickinson considered theater to be “the workshop of democracy” and drew on the spirit of LaFollette-style Progressivism to establish the Wisconsin Dramatic Society to ensure the proliferation of locally produced theater throughout the state. Zona Gale, a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright from Portage, was among the many playwrights whom Dickinson nurtured through his work.

But it wasn’t just theater. The influence of the Wisconsin Idea in the arts could be felt—and heard—by the thousands of rural residents who participated in singing societies inspired by Professor Edgar “Pop” Gordon. Gordon had begun his career at Hull House in Chicago and was deeply influenced by founder Jane Addams’ belief that arts are “a potent agent for making the universal appeal, and inducing men to forget their differences.” Like Addams, Gordon found that singing, in particular, could help build strong communities. He put this theory to practice in places like De Pere, where he created an ecumenical choral society to help bridge social distinctions. After years of criss-crossing Wisconsin by train to coordinate the creation of choral groups, Gordon took his ideas to the producers of the newly established WHA radio. Developed to help deliver ideas and learning to the rural communities of the state, WHA eventually became home to Gordon’s immensely popular “Journeys in Musicland” and “Let’s Sing!” broadcasts, which were aimed largely at schoolchildren and heard in hundreds of classrooms from 1931 to 1955.

Many in Wisconsin were beginning to see how the arts could improve the cultural fabric of their state, but few understood the role the arts and creativity could play in Wisconsin’s economic development. In an article titled “What the University Can Do for the Business Man,” in the Bulletin of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Milwaukee (May 1908), Charles Van Hise wrote, “I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, … and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”

The tools the university had at its disposal— correspondence courses, farm short courses, visiting professors, WHA Radio—if used correctly could extend education opportunities to all. These tools were made even more effective through collaboration with agents of the federal Cooperative Extension program, who were broadly charged with the improvement of rural life. In addition to sharing best practices around agriculture, home economics, and other important subjects, Cooperative Extension agents often encouraged “home talent” plays at county fairs, the first being in Vernon County in 1925.

By 1932, 40 of Wisconsin’s then 71 counties (Menominee County was added in 1959) had held at least one drama event, leading to a statewide drama festival in Madison, hosted by Cooperative Exten-

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sion and the College of Agriculture, with judges from the Speech Department. Audiences there might have seen a production of the comedy Goose Money, by Marion Lucy Felton, the script for which was published by University Extension in 1928. The play is especially notable in that it includes a preface on the importance of rural arts—“there is poetry as well as production on a farm”—by then University of Wisconsin President Glenn Frank. Moreover, it likely that this play was chosen for publication because Mrs. Felton, describing herself as “just an ordinary farm woman,” had created an authentic portrayal of farm life that could “tempt other farm men and women to try their hand at developing real rural folk drama.”

In a sweeping study titled The Arts Workshop of Rural America (1938), sociologist Marjorie Patten described the impact of the work of Cooperative Extension agents in the arts: The fact that plays are produced in addition to discussions of problems such as dairy marketing, the financing of rural education, … taxation, and so forth, and that these interests are supplemented by music festivals and folk-dancing events, have proved that farmers are thinking of the drama not as an end in itself but as a normal part of a program that meets the needs of whole communities.

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nspired by the Danish Folk School movement, in which cultural learning was integral to learning the skills of farming, UW College of Agriculture Dean Chris Christensen asked John Barton of the Rural Sociology Department to help develop a visual arts program for rural communities. In 1936, the two men struck upon the idea of inviting landscape painter John Steuart Curry to the University of Wisconsin for a rural artist residency, the first of its kind in the United States.

Under the banner of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program, Curry traveled across the state to inspire Wisconsin farmers and their family members to paint, carve, sculpt—to find the “culture in agriculture.” On his visits, Curry would encourage the formation of local artist clubs, the first being the Rural Rembrandts of Wautoma.

Curry’s colleague James Schwalbach complemented this outreach work in the visual arts through his “Let’s Draw!” radio program, which ran on WHA and later Wisconsin Public Radio from 1936 to 1970. Because many rural schools had only one room and few faculty with any inkling about art, for over thirty years Schwalbach became the de facto art teacher for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin students.

Because of the boom in painting, drawing, and sculpture during the years immediately following World War II, the university hired Robert E. Gard in 1945 to do for theater and writing what Curry

Robert Gard visits with farmers on May 9, 1955. Gard traveled across the state (note the Wisconsin Idea Theater logo painted on the side of his truck) to promote and cultivate the theatrical arts in rural communities. Gard was a well-known figure in Wisconsin through his travels as well as his WHA-Radio program, and later WHA-TV program, “Wisconsin Is My Doorstep.”

UW Digital Collections/ID S15183

The Milwaukee Journal at the time noted the Patten study and summarized the importance of its findings, stating in an editorial, “When rural communities reveal such a hunger for plays, it means something—something big.”

But it wasn’t just a hunger for plays that was growing across the state. A new movement to meet the demand for more opportunity in the visual arts was also underway.

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and Schwalbach were doing for the visual arts. Established that same year, Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater nurtured scores of new community theater groups and encouraged local writers to pen their own shows. A few years later, Gard brought together the first meeting of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association to decide how “to best further the native literature and lore of Wisconsin.”

Like Ethel Rockwell and John Steuart Curry, Gard and his staff offered nearly unlimited advice and support to grassroots theater and writing groups (indeed Gard’s family often complained that he was seldom home). In addition, Gard and his colleague David Peterson traveled across the state with a theater troupe to stage plays as well as Peterson’s original musicals about Wisconsin history, stories, and issues. These shows were performed everywhere, from community centers and school gyms to county fairs and state parks.

A 1949 article in the New York Times neatly articulated the relationship between the Wisconsin Idea and the out-pouring of drama in rural Wisconsin: It is a theatre whose walls are the boundaries of the State of Wisconsin, whose stage is as large as all the stages in the state put together, whose audience numbers in the millions and whose participants are the thousands of actors, directors, technicians, and playwrights within the boundaries of the state.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, key members of UW Extension’s faculty continued to champion the arts and support grassroots endeavors, including Karen Cowan, a former cheerleader with the Green Bay Packers who traveled the state offering dance and choreography workshops. County Extension agents were central in the creation of a crafts guild to help guide marketing of home products such as placemats and glassware made by rural artists.

Established in 1945, Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater nurtured scores of new community theater groups and encouraged local writers to pen their own shows. A few years later, Gard brought together the first meeting of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association to decide how “to best further the native literature and lore of Wisconsin.”

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It was during this time that Wisconsin’s best-known historian, former County Extension agent Jerry Apps, got his start as a writer with a weekly column titled “Outdoor Notebook” for the Waushara Argus. Clutching a fistful of his collected columns, Apps visited Robert Gard’s office in Madison to see if Gard could help turn them into a book. With Gard’s encouragement and under his publishing imprimatur, Apps created The Land Still Lives in 1970, thereby launching one of the greatest literary careers in Wisconsin history.

(In 2019, the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published a 50th anniversary edition of the book.)

By 1965, Gard had set his sights on cultivating creativity at the community level in new ways. As director of the Office of Community Arts Development in the UW–Madison College of Agriculture, he began working with communities to establish arts councils to better serve local needs. He and his colleagues distributed over 20,000 copies of their seminal book, The Arts in the Small Community: A National Plan, which sought to re-establish the economic and cultural vitality of America’s faltering towns and rural areas through the incorporation of and participation in the arts.

“In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone. They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theater,” wrote Gard in the introduction to the book. “As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and in the places where the people live.

The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves.”

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he reverberations of the Gard plan and the indefatigable contributions of those others who for more than a hundred years have worked to apply the Wisconsin Idea to the arts are still felt today.

The Wisconsin Regional Writers Association continues today as the Wisconsin Writers Association to encourage, educate, support, and promote Wisconsin writers. John Steuart Curry’s art program is still going strong, too. Today’s Wisconsin Regional Art Program (WRAP), which is managed through the University of Wisconsin– Madison Department of Continuing Studies, holds twenty regional workshops and exhibitions statewide every year. The Association of Wisconsin Artists, a nonprofit group of more than five hundred artists—including that first group, the Rural Rembrandts—supports WRAP’s work in multiple ways and also sponsors a mentorship program for teens and an annual exhibit event for the elementary-age children.

The early work of the Wisconsin Idea Theater is reflected in today’s Northern Sky Theater, which got its start through an incredibly successful David Peterson production of Song of the Inland Seas at Peninsula State Park. According to Northern Sky’s artistic advisor Doc Heide, the endeavor “seemed to grow from the soil of the Wisconsin woodlands.” A former student of Peterson, Heide remarks that the Northern Sky is “a true theatre of the folk, carrying forth songs and themes that had found their way here in the canoes of French voyageurs or the holds of iron ore ships. To offer these gems under a swirl of stars with the smell of campfires warming your soul—priced so that anyone who hankered to could come—was the [Wisconsin Idea Theatre] vision indeed.”

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Lois Ireland, Morning Glory, 1948. Oil on canvas, 30⅝ x 35¼ inches. Collection of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Born in Waunakee in 1928, Lois Ireland is known for her scenes of 1940s and 1950s rural Wisconsin. John Steuart Curry encouraged the young Ireland to study art and brought her into the newly formed Wisconsin Regional Art Program. During this time, she produced her most important regionalist work, contributing along with artists Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood to the American Pastoral tradition.

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Watching a night performance under a canopy of stars at Northern Sky Theatre in Door County is a one-of-a-kind experience. The theater has its roots in the Peninsula State Part-based Heritage Ensemble, founded in the early 1970s by Wisconsin Idea Theatre stalwart David Peterson.

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The impact of Gard’s report, The Arts in the Small Community, can be seen today in direct and indirect ways. Melinda Childs, Community Cultural Development Director at ArtStart in Rhinelander, says that “the spirit of [the former Rhinelander] School of the Arts has long been infused” in ArtStart programs as well as in the Northern National Art Competition and Northern Arts Council support of cultural activity throughout the region. Childs notes that “more recently new generations have embraced that same spirit and infused it into Project North,” a music, art, and environmental sustainability festival.

On her travels across the state, Executive Director of Arts Wisconsin Ann Katz finds herself reminding people that “Wisconsin is an especially creative place with a long history of encouraging the arts from the grassroots on up.” While the University of Wisconsin was indeed important to the movement to make arts a centerpiece of rural communities, she notes that statewide arts groups such as the Wisconsin Arts Board, municipal governments, and countless local creative endeavors have been and continue to be central to creative expression in our state.

Once you see this creative expression, you realize it is everywhere. It’s in the exhibition of works by six contemporary Black female artists from Milwaukee currently on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. It’s in the powerful murals painted in downtown Madison and Milwaukee in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Maybe you’ve noticed it in industrial-themed murals on factory walls in Beloit or in the Art D’Tour installations that dot the green hills of Sauk County or in the songs of Maa Vue of Wausau, who draws on her Hmong roots to create contemporary pop music.

For some it is easier to grasp the impact of the arts on our communities when it is represented in dollars and cents. According

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to research released in March 2020 by the U.S. Department of Commerce and National Endowment for the Arts, Wisconsin’s creative sector in 2017 provided a $10.1 billion economic benefit— 3.1% percent of the state’s gross domestic product—and employed over 96,651 people. “That’s more jobs than the state’s beer, biotech, and papermaking industries” combined, notes Arts Wisconsin’s Katz.

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isconsin is, indeed, a state of creativity, born of a vision crafted more than a century ago and cultivated through a partnership between our citizens, communities, and university and extension systems.

In 1997, at end of her ten-year term as the dean and director of University Cooperative Extension, Ayse Somersan published a series of case studies on the businesses, nonprofits, cultural organizations, and other groups and associations in Wisconsin that have benefitted greatly from UW faculty support.

In Distinguished Service: University of Wisconsin Faculty and Staff Helping to Build Organizations in the State, Somersan observes, “There were [those] who spent a lifetime helping Wisconsin people lead creative and satisfying lives through involvement in the arts. They were University of Wisconsin professors with vision and energy. They partnered with community leaders and artists around the state and institutionalized the idea that the arts are for everyone. This was the University at its best. It was a shining example of the Wisconsin Idea.”

Maryo Gard Ewell is both literally and figuratively a child of the Wisconsin Idea. Her father, Robert E. Gard, who created the Wisconsin Idea Theater, inspired her work in community arts development. She has worked for local arts councils in Connecticut, and for the state arts agency in both Illinois and Colorado, winding up her forty-year career as the designer of Colorado’s Creative Districts program. She is currently the Director of Community Impact for the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley, Colorado, where she lives.

Two new resources explore the history of the Wisconsin Idea in the arts. The first is the Robert E. Gard Oral History Collection, a project of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives and the Gard Foundation. Organized by Professor Emeritus of Theater Harv Thompson, the collection includes eighteen interviews with influential artists and educators who worked for UW Extension; it can be found at wisconsinacademy.org/GardOral Histories. The second is a collection of essays edited by UW–Madison sociology professor Chad Alan Goldberg, titled Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea. Published in fall 2020 by the University of Wisconsin Press, Education for Democracy includes an extensive chapter on the arts and argues for a restoration of the value of state universities and humanities education as a public good.

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NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS

BY CATI E D EM ETS

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magine a city canopied by green, a community bursting at the seams with plant life. In this

place, residents and business owners swap their lawns for perennial plantings and an army of city workers manages the lush natural areas that reach across every neighborhood—regardless of socioeconomic class.

Here, a once-empty lot is transformed into a community garden; there, an abandoned warehouse has been removed and turned into a forested park. Formerly sunbaked streets become tree-shaded boulevards, encouraging people to walk or bike to local businesses.

Older buildings are retrofitted with rooftop gardens, and new constructions are built to maximize tree cover

Jon Elliott/MKE Drones

and minimize open pavement.

This 24-acre stretch of land along the Menomonee River in Milwaukee used to be an abandoned rail yard. In 2013 a group of state and local partners completed its transformation into an urban green space. Today, Three Bridges Park is home to an urban ecology center and bike paths, and hosts over 50,000 visitors every year.

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Sounds like a garden-lover’s dream, right?

While it’s true that urban greening on this level would be beautiful, in this idealized city it is happening for another reason: to fight climate change. Urban greening is one among many examples of activities known as natural climate solutions that communities—both urban and rural—around the globe are adopting. While natural climate solutions sounds like a hip new term, it’s really just a catch-all name for the many land conservation, restoration, and management practices that work to capture and store carbon found in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

At a time when our world needs swift, effective action to address climate change, natural climate solutions are pragmatic options for sequestering greenhouse gases. According to a recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, natural climate solutions could provide up to 37% of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperature rise under 2°C. Part of what makes them so effective is that the infrastructure to increase the scale and scope of many natural climate solutions already exists. Here in Wisconsin, a committed group of researchers, businesses, municipalities, and citizens is already hard at work developing natural climate solutions for our cities, agricultural lands, and forests.

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he idea of urban forestry is not new to Wisconsin. Throughout the nineteenth century, Madison and Milwaukee led efforts to plant trees and establish public natural areas. The leaders of these efforts viewed urban forests as important mainly for their aesthetic value and as a place for the public to enjoy nature. While these values remain at the core of many urban forestry efforts, city planners, researchers, and urban residents today recognize a much broader suite of benefits that includes carbon sequestration.

Because they do an efficient job of removing carbon from CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and sequestering it in their roots, trunks, and branches, trees are primary tools for natural climate solutions.

Today, communities across Wisconsin are heavily investing in tree planting projects with climate in mind. Abe Lenoch, Community Project Coordinator at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, is currently working with four cities—Ashland, Bayside, Oshkosh,

Because they do an efficient job of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in their roots, trunks, and branches, trees are primary tools for natural climate solutions.

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and Sheboygan—to expand their urban forest canopies through a collaborative planting initiative. These cities are all Green Tier Legacy Communities, which means that they are working with state agencies and nonprofit organizations to develop and implement long-term community sustainability plans.

According to Lenoch, these cities planted their trees to address both the long-term threat of climate change and a more nearterm one: flooding. Trees can efficiently mitigate flooding. Lenoch explains, “Leaves intercept rain on its way to the ground, which … reduces the infiltration rate of rain into the groundwater,” giving the ground more time to absorb the water. Trees also reduce “the overall amount of runoff, because leaves absorb water molecules from their surfaces and water vapor from the air.” The four Green Tier Legacy Communities selected climate-resilient tree varieties and strategically planted them in flood-prone areas. Within just a year of planting trees, these communities are already seeing improvements in flood control and water quality in their watersheds.

An expanded tree canopy also helps reduce the urban “heat island” effect, decreasing energy demand for cooling and thereby lowering carbon emissions from power plants. Emphasizing the myriad benefits of urban forestry, Lenoch explains that “you can use manmade structures and surfaces to get the same cooling effects of trees. But they don’t provide wildlife habitat like trees do. They don’t reduce traffic speeds like trees do. They don’t provide the other public health benefits that trees provide, like improved mental and physical health. That’s the best part of trees as a climate solution.”

While urban forestry can be seen as a silver bullet, Lenoch warns that “you can’t just plant any tree anywhere and leave it and expect it to have all these co-benefits. You have to plan what you plant and where you plant it. You have to have a maintenance plan for the life of the tree. You have to have a replacement plan in case the tree dies.

You have to work with community members and neighborhood residents. Urban forestry projects are not just about planting more trees. There’s more that goes into it over the long term.”

While all these elements add up to long-term investment, the many benefits that trees provide—from carbon sequestration to reduced energy demands to improved water quality to elevated public health—make the effort worthwhile. As Lenoch says, “Trees are a vital tool for the health of all Wisconsin communities.”

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griculture is one of Wisconsin’s leading industries, as the state is home to over 13 million acres of farmland. According to Fred Clark, Executive Director of Wisconsin’s Green Fire, “whether farms serve as a net carbon source or a net carbon sink depends largely on cropping methods, farm operations, and nutrient inputs.”

Clark says that Wisconsin’s farm acreage is mainly managed through practices that emit, rather than store, carbon. This means we are missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage natural climate solutions in the fight against climate change.

As a conglomeration of minerals, living microbes, and plant matter, soil has the inherent capacity to store carbon. Different agricultural management systems can damage or enhance this capacity.

Practices common among large-scale conventional operations, such as intensive tillage and the application of broad-spectrum agrochemicals, can damage the natural carbon storage capacity of soil.

These operations often emit significant greenhouse gases through

use of fossil fuel-burning equipment and other energy-intensive practices. By and large, these kinds of operations are net carbon sources.

By contrast, net carbon sinks are agricultural operations that minimize soil disturbance through targeted weeding, rather than wholesale tillage, and use of nutrient-fixing crops to keep soil covered in order to enhance the natural capacity of soil to maintain fertility and store carbon.

Imagine if we could leverage more of Wisconsin’s vast agricultural acreage into a giant carbon sink. Diane Mayerfeld, Senior Outreach Specialist at UW–Madison’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, says that “there are many ways to improve the climate footprint of agriculture.”

One especially promising new practice for climate-focused farming is perennial agriculture. Mayerfeld notes that, for the most part, “all of our major staple grain crops, including corn, wheat, barley, and rye … grow for half of the year. During the other half of the year, the soil is bare.” On the whole, this type of agricultural system—spring planting, fall harvest—tends to emit carbon and leave soil vulnerable to carbon loss through erosion and respiration (free interaction of organic material with the air) during the intervening months.

Across the Midwest, farmers and researchers are working together to breed a robust spectrum of climate-resilient, perennial grain crops that could live through a whole year or more and be harvested multiple times before they die. These range from familiar crops such as grasses, wheat, sorghum, and various legumes to new crops like Kernza, a relative of annual wheat. According to Mayerfeld, perennial crops such as these can sequester carbon “as soon as it warms up, instead of just for a few months of the year. At the same time, they keep the soil covered, so it’s less prone to carbon loss.”

While many of these varieties need to be further refined before they are ready for broad-scale application, Mayerfeld says they show “great promise for setting a more sustainable course for our global agricultural systems.”

Beyond their potential for capturing carbon, diversified agricultural systems can also provide a variety of economic opportunities.

Mayerfeld tells the story of a Wisconsin farmer who returned to his parents’ conventional dairy farm and is in the process of transforming their operation to an all-perennial grass farm to raise grass-fed beef, sheep, and pastured poultry and pork. The farmer practices rotational grazing and has also planted fruit trees that provide shade for his animals and additional carbon-capture capacity. His integrated approach to farming reflects an emerging practice known as silvopasture in which the management of trees for timber or fruit is integrated with the production of pastured livestock and their forage.

This type of diversified agriculture especially makes sense for Wisconsin when you consider the history of our lands. “We had huge amounts of carbon stored in soil beneath our diverse prairie systems. Over 8,000 years, our grasslands—which co-evolved with ruminants (like bison)—were responsible for building up the deep, carbon-rich soils” that make Wisconsin so well suited for agriculture, Mayerfeld says. Shifting to agricultural systems that more closely reflect this history is an exciting new development that holds great potential for healthier farms and a cleaner planet. While

Abe Lenoch/1000 Friends of Wisconsin

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Bill Sturm, Oshkosh City Forester & Landscape Operations Manager, stands in front of a young redbud tree planted by the city to help capture rainfall. Sturm’s work is part of a larger, statewide initiative through 1000 Friends of Wisconsin that draws on a U.S. Forest Service grant through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to reduce runoff and improve water quality.

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Nancy Bozek (left), a UW–Stevens Point faculty member and Director of the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association, and Wisconsin DNR Region Team Supervisor Andrew Sorenson (right) talk with Kevin Ponsler (center), a Procurement Manager for Biewer Lumber, about to how to responsibly harvest a forested area in Wood County while maximizing its capacity for carbon capture.

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this effort is still in its early stages, Mayerfeld is enthusiastic: “We want to make this shift in a big way.”

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otaling over 14 million acres, Wisconsin’s forests represent a significant carbon sink for our state. Current management of these forests is intended to balance a variety of needs, from animal habitat to recreation to timber harvesting. However, most management plans don’t explicitly consider carbon storage.

Managing forests for carbon storage can include a variety of practices: extending the time between tree harvests, thinning trees to ensure that the healthiest ones can thrive, and selecting species that are well-suited for a given planting location and hardy to the effects of climate change and pests like the emerald ash borer. Including these kinds of practices in forest management—along with statewide efforts in reforestation and afforestation (planting trees in previously un-forested areas)—could dramatically increase carbon storage potential for Wisconsin.

Of course, these natural climate solutions are more effective when implemented on more acres. Fred Clark describes how a program called My Wisconsin Woods powerfully leverages this concept. A partnership between the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and several other entities, My Wisconsin Woods provides private forest owners across the state with resources and technical assistance to engage in meaningful forest stewardship.

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While some programs specifically work with large, institutional landholders of 100,000 acres or more, My Wisconsin Woods primarily works with families who own smaller forested acreages.

This group of owners “makes up the majority of forest ownership in the state collectively,” according to Clark. Yet, he notes, “they’re also the hardest audience to reach and work with [because] many family forest owners are absentee owners who only visit their land occasionally.” Too, there’s frequent turnover. “On average, every seven years a family forest parcel is either sold or transferred to a new family member.”

My Wisconsin Woods uses social media, marketing, and other tools to provide information to new and long-time forest owners and get them more engaged in forest stewardship. The program provides information on everything from wildlife management to climate change to invasive species management—all the various facets that Clark says are important for considering forest health and productivity. By deploying tailored tactics for different kinds of landowners and speaking to a variety of possible motivations that family forest owners may have, My Wisconsin Woods has been highly successful in “creating a critical mass for landscape-scale impact” on climate change.

This kind of widespread, active engagement in forest management is becoming increasingly important, Clark says, because “we know that forests are one of our best sinks for carbon in the U.S. and in the world. … But forests are also under stress because of droughts, floods, and other impacts of climate change like increased introduction of invasive species. More than ever, people who care about forests are recognizing that we need to be active stewards. There are fewer and fewer cases where we can leave forests to their own devices and assume they’ll get better.”

However, effective stewardship can be a lot of work for forest owners. “The art is to try to balance their many goals in a way that is affordable and best meets the individual needs of forest owners so they’re willing to stay in the stewardship game,” says Clark.

Whether you are a family forest owner who uses your land for recreation or growing timber—or both—chances are you already have some kind of plan to manage your forest. “We keep stacking needs and goals onto our forests,” says Clark, “and the need for our forests to help solve our climate problem is one more goal that we increasingly need to consider, and that forest owners are starting to consider.”

F

rom the first forms of algae in our ancient oceans to the perennial grasses and fast-growing trees of today, nature has always found myriad ways to manage carbon in our atmosphere. Yet our planet’s innate capacity for handling carbon has been overwhelmed over the past hundred years by the rapid emission of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. There are well–known and effective ways to curb these emissions, from reducing our personal energy consumption to employing renewable technologies like wind and solar power. However, natural climate solutions offer a unique opportunity for us to take advantage of our abundance of productive land, soil, and water in Wisconsin to capture the carbon that is already out there. Combined with major emissions reductions and a massive implementation of renewable energy projects, natural climate solutions can greatly accelerate our progress toward a cleaner, greener future.

ACAD EMY ISSU ES N AT U R A L C L I M AT E S O L UTI O N S R E P O RT From October 2018 to May 2020, the Wisconsin Academy regularly brought together a network of leaders from academia, public agencies, nonprofits, tribal nations, farms, and forestry to examine and develop a wide variety of cross-cutting strategies for advancing natural climate solutions in Wisconsin.

From these meetings the Academy developed Natural Climate Solutions for Wisconsin: Critical Considerations & Strategies, a report detailing promising strategies for advancing natural climate solutions and equitably addressing climate change in Wisconsin. The report is available for download as a PDF at wisconsinacademy.org/NCS4WI.

Catie DeMets is the Academy’s Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives coordinator. She brings an array of experience in sustainable food systems development and a commitment to building equitable and resilient communities to the Academy staff. DeMets has a BA in Geology and Environmental Studies from Lawrence University and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, where she graduated as a Bertha Morton Fellow in May 2018.

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@ Watrous Gallery

FOUR EXHIBITIONS, DEFERRED J O DY CLOWES

I

f this were a normal 2020, the James Watrous Gallery would be featuring solo shows by artists Robin Jebavy and Andrew

Redington over the summer months and then Kyoung Ae Cho and Dakota Mace in the fall. However, as the gallery will be closed until Overture Center for the Arts can confidently reopen, all of their exhibits have been postponed. In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy this small sampling of these four Wisconsin artists’ incredible work.

Andrew Redington, Roundabout, 2016.

Sculpture, upcycled furniture, canvas, 70 by 70 by 30 inches.

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Robin Jebavy, Plate with Wreath (Mary Nohl’s Sunrise over Lake Michigan)*, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 68 by 67 inches. *The artist Mary Nohl lived and worked in Fox Point, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

ROBIN JEBAVY Brookfield, Wisconsin

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@ Watrous Gallery

Robin Jebavy, J.S. Bach’s Organ, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 70 by 84 inches.

Robin Jebavy makes paintings with a dizzying, kaleidoscopic impact. They describe a shimmering infinite field, with no apparent limits and a teasingly ambiguous depth of field. Layers of transparent hues are interrupted by shafts of reflected light, creating brilliant highlights within a rich interplay of colors. The effect is almost hallucinatory, like an ecstatic vision composed in stained glass.

She begins each painting by photographing arrangements of thrift store plates, serving dishes, and glasses filled with colored water. By layering and mirroring these images in Photoshop, she creates a structure that can be projected on canvas as a starting point. Working loosely at first, Jebavy gradually builds up the painting, adding new elements as the image evolves. There’s an alchemical aspect to her process, transforming repeated images of cheap glassware into sumptuous, radiant canvases.

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Andrew Redington, Dischairge, 2015. Print from furniture parts, 36 by 36 inches.

ANDREW REDINGTON Berlin, Wisconsin

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@ Watrous Gallery

Andrew Redington, Thwarted Stool, 2015. Print from chair parts, 32 by 20 inches.

Trained in woodworking, Andrew Redington has a long-held fascination with furniture form.

His sculptures are made by deconstructing old pieces—chairs, wardrobes, sideboards, and vanities—and reconfiguring their parts into unexpected shapes. While the final form may be radically new, the original furniture elements are recognizable, and Redington often applies strong color to emphasize their individuality while adding visual resonance.

Several years ago, Redington began making prints directly from his sculptures, inking impressions from them as if they were huge woodblocks. More recently, he has been creating prints with individual furniture parts, using color to enliven and isolate the different elements.

The warm wood-grain, familiar shapes, and lively compositions give these abstractions a playful quality, as if old chairs and tables, left alone in the attic, had begun to dance.

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Kyoung Ae Cho, Excess I, 2014–2019 (detail). Crabapple pedicels, burn marks, thread, and matte medium on canvas, 24 by 24 inches.

KYOUNG AE CHO Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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@ Watrous Gallery

Kyoung Ae Cho, Spring, 2019 (detail). Leaves collected in spring, burn marks, thread, matte medium, and Korean rice paper on canvas, 12 by 12 inches.

Kyoung Ae Cho is engaged in a conversation with nature. Encompassing sculpture, installation, and fiber-based works, her art is grounded in an intimate dialogue with her materials.

Cho starts each piece by mindfully gathering and preparing organic matter and objects of little value, attending to the way their physical properties reveal nature’s language of growth and change. As she explains, “Each meditative, repetitive gesture, each cut, stitch, and placement is part of the experience of merging the natural and the man-made, the physical and the spiritual.”

Cho’s patient, collaborative approach to working with natural materials is a poignant metaphor for our relationship with the environment. At a time when we are facing the twin crises of intense climate change and species loss, the humility and tenderness of her process offer both hope and inspiration.

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Dakota Mace, Dootł’izh, 2018. Handmade abaca paper, seeds, indigo dye, 12 by 16 ½ inches.

DAKOTA MACE Madison, Wisconsin

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@ Watrous Gallery

Dakota Mace, Na’ashch’ąą’ I–IV, 2018. Digital archive prints of scanned cyanotypes, 24 by 24 inches each.

Dakota Mace extends the vocabulary of traditional weaving to re-interpret the Diné (Navajo) concept of balance within nature. Her art often centers on the symmetry of the four-pointed motif representing Na’ashjéii Asdzáá, or Spiderwoman, who brought weaving to the Diné, as well as the four sacred colors and mountains of Diné culture. While Mace’s work can be appreciated purely for its graphic power and sensitive use of color, it is also a rare and generous offering: a window into the world of the Diné.

Mace is skilled in several media, including weaving, beadwork, papermaking, and photography. As with the work above, she often favors alternative photography processes, translating traditional motifs into the language of contemporary art. No matter what medium she chooses, Mace weaves in her understanding of the symbolic abstractions in the Diné creation story.

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Fiction

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2020

Fiction

JUNK SHED

BY JACQ U ELYN TH O MAS

M

y father eats braunschweiger sandwiches, thick ones he squeezes tight to hold together. He

holds them with the hand that’s missing a finger. Bread fills in the empty space. It bulges out like a roll of fat.

His good hand is taking a nap. It’s a boulder that doesn’t move beside his plate.

Illustration by Laura Ovberg

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J U D G E’S N OTES

Only cousins ever ask about that finger. He makes them guess. Bobcat? Wolf ? Vampire Bat? Then he says my name and laughs. She eats everything. Nobody ever calls him a liar.

Mom comes to the table with a cup of coffee and smooths lotion into her arms, swooping it over her shoulders and up her long neck. She’s June pink from the garden but will be nut brown by July. “Best change out of those school clothes,” she says. A warm patch of happiness swells in my belly. I push it to my toes and swing my feet beneath the table. My dress is for everyday now, I remind her, because this day was a half-day and the last day of school.

“Got work to do,” he says. “Don’t nobody want to be seeing your underpants.” I don’t have to look at him to know how his tongue is working through a clay-colored mess.

“Junk shed,” Mom says, hands tangling like two squirming kittens. “Spreader’s waiting.

Couple of scour calves in it.” She lifts her cup. There’s a creamy clot of lotion between the wing bones of her throat. Jergen’s. Folger’s. Silver Spring Horseradish. The kitchen is churning with smells. Zippo. Pall Mall.

“Get a move on,” he says, scraping back his chair. “Don’t got all day.”

I take my own sweet time and drink slowly, never lifting my eyes from the milk in my glass until the screen door slams behind him. I wipe my mouth and look. The smoke he left behind curdles in the noonday sun.

That finger was bitten by a barn door. Long before I was born. It got the gangrene and then it was gone. Mom told me. I never ask him a thing. Not if I can help it.

“Junk shed,” Mom says, rapping the table to get my attention. She swallows the last of her coffee while standing at the sink and follows my father outside.

O

CH LO E BENJAM I N In this vivid and tender story, gender roles, sex, and power are masterfully rendered t h ro u g h t h e d a i l y i nt e ra c t i o n s a n d violence of the natural world—all in stylish and visceral prose.

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nce a year we empty the junk shed and start over. It’s nothing like a holiday, which is what the first day of summer vacation should be. It’s a little bit like clearing out a school desk, except that was easy—scuffed box of crayons, warped ruler, chewed up pencils, baby scissors—nothing I want for fifth grade. In the junk shed are things we can’t burn. Heaps of tin cans and piles of busted jars and broken bottles. After I shovel them in, the manure spreader will spit them out, into a sinkhole by the barb-wire fence.

The gym shorts I brought home are musty. I pull them on anyway, under my dress, and step into last-year’s loafers. There’s a bucket on the counter for table scraps. I slap its lid tight. I’ll do my chores, I tell the creaky screen door, in the order I want.

O

nly a few sugar maples shade the hen yard. The chicken coop is dark and dusty. When the last blinking chicken flusters past, I slop table scraps out behind them. There they are. Sure enough. Maggots. The rooster gets to them first, planting his reptilian feet in a pile of brothers and sisters.

I know a lot about maggots because I know a lot about flies.

I like watching chickens eat. Their beaks pop down and right back up.

They nibble and consider things. They discuss stuff. Chickens have good manners. I suppose it’s the rooster who trains them, but I don’t like how he does it, singling one out to blindside with trouble. Maybe her friends will take a few jittery sidesteps, but they mind their own business and keep on pecking. It would be impolite to stare. They pretend not to notice his beak at her neck. His great thorny feet digging into her back. Her breast pressed into the ground. They won’t look up until he hops off, shaking his tail feathers like guess I showed her. Then they watch only him. Strutting his stuff, puffing up, and wobbling his ugly red wattle. I have a rock in the nest of my lap. If that rooster is of a mind to teach someone, anyone, something or anything today, I’ll knock him senseless.

The hen house is at the hem of the hilltop we live on. Below it a steep road and chilly creek run like two skinny legs down to the bottomlands. Pigeon Lane tip-toes slow and shady past an outcropping of rock faces guarding our woods, before breaking out in a straight sunny

Fiction

sprint to the mailbox. I won’t go any further than that all summer: standing on a gummy lip of blacktop at the end of our dusty road, prying open a zinc mailbox. None of the letters will be for me. I know this. What I don’t know is who I’ll be when the school bus carries me away from there again. The giddiness of summer isn’t three months without school, it’s the excitement of the surprise you might be to yourself when you return.

A barn door rumbles behind me. I jump up. Stepping from that dark mouth is my father.

Swinging my bucket to prove I’m doing something, even if it isn’t the something I’m supposed to be doing, I head back up toward the house, and the junk shed standing beside it.

He doesn’t notice. There’s a heifer tied up in the barnyard, haltered to a fence beside the milk house. He checks to see that the knots are tight before moseying on down to her other end. Then he stands there. Holding her tail. Doing nothing. Only taking a good long look.

Me too, standing in the shadow between our house and the junk shed, tractor, and manure spreader.

None of my cousins have a junk shed, though most of them live on farms. It’s nothing to talk about, what families do with trash, but we do get around to every outbuilding eventually and I’ve never seen another junk shed. People who live in town must talk about it. Their garbage is somebody’s business and they owe it to everybody to have it to the street on time.

I rinse the scrap bucket out with the garden hose and set it on the porch to dry. I think our back porch was somebody’s front porch, long ago. Three slender poles rise like spindles and blossom into lacy fans. People probably came by here once, in buggies, to sit and visit on this porch, back in olden times, before the yard fell off. Ten paces out, an iron curlicue gate opens onto nothing. Long grasses tumble through its fence, hanging like shaggy bangs over a salt lick and water tank. The other end of that fence almost connects to the junk shed but doesn’t quite reach. Instead it sags into itself and curls away, making room for crumbling steps that end in a boot-sucking river of cow shit and clay. Tractors are stronger than cars, which is why our front porch is a cobbled-on back porch, with a freezer and woodpile inside.

I wrap a post in the crook of my arm. It’s smooth and warm. Leaning out, I threaten to drop myself, letting the belly of my arm slide until one hand snatches me up short and the other, glides into view at my side. Above me, wasps so skinny I can’t see their waists are building a nest. It looks like an empty corn cob becoming an empty sunflower. My fingers begin to give. At the very last second, I jerk myself back and grab on. I am both the hero and the happy damsel on the stage of this long narrow porch, taking a bow and kissing my own hand. A barn cat passes by but doesn’t look.

If I could rescue anyone, it would be Mom. We’d go to town. She’d have a butter-yellow kitchen with breezy curtains, fat tulips on the table, and a window so close to the neighbor lady’s house she could lean out to chat or pass her a sugary pie. Out back would be a stoop for snapping peas and a come-along laundry-line for pulling in fresh sheets and sending out damp dishtowels. Up front there’d be a wide columned porch and brisk flag, with a whistling mailman climbing its steps, a garden just for flowers, and a silver trashcan.

I wish I’d been born to live in town. That’s what I’m thinking—posed like a jewelry box ballerina, bare foot against one knee, an arm sweeping up overhead—until I remember wasps, the live wires of their legs too close to my hand.

I learned about me by reading a piece of junk mail. Life Science Library. Limited Time Offer. Time-Life Books. A cartoon kid had a question. What does a baby do for the nine months it is inside its mother? I’d never thought of it before, the time between my birthday in June and a wedding in December the year before.

Here is a trick I know. A bucket half-full of water is also half-full of air. If I stand in the middle of our half-yard swinging my arm like a windmill, I can make the air make the water stay inside. It can go on like this forever, so long as my arm keeps up, and not a drop will splash on my head. Now I’m wondering how it will work if I swing the bucket sideways and I’m the one spinning. My ears are full of wind and blood pumping, but I catch the tail end of a whistle and my name barked out. I stop short. The water sloshes.

It’s only Mom, bringing Rodney to the tank for water. I wave so she knows I heard her and to show her I’m walking drunk, but that I know what I’m supposed to be doing and heading for the junk shed. The world is nearly steady, my ears almost empty of sound, when a great

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and grinding gear shifts. Something heavy is clearing its throat to make the climb up our hill.

A dust plume evaporates along the bottomlands and flashes of silver wink between the trees.

I whirl through the grass to find my missing shoe and head up without my foot is firmly in it.

Beyond the junk shed. Past the garden. In between new carrots and nettles.

F

rank the milkman is fat. He wears white coveralls that never get dirty and black rubber boots that shine like church shoes. The cab of his truck is two-stories-tall. He fills up its wide window. “School out already?” Frank doesn’t have any kids. Summer comes to him by surprise. He’s patting his top pockets, looking for a pen, when it’s already right there in his hand, on the clipboard he uses for measurements.

I’m leaning against the scratchy wall of the milk house, picking lime scales from the rough boards with my fingernails, waiting for him to climb down. He’s considering a tiny pair of brown bottles, twisting them this way and that, before writing their numbers down. His hands are plump as dinner rolls and dimpled like a baby’s. The bottles clink when he plops them inside a pocket. He stuffs a couple of rubber gloves in there to keep them quiet.

There’s a hole in the milk house behind me with a door like an upside-down mailbox. I find it with my fingers while Frank feels around for his cap. This is where the hose of his milk truck snakes in to connect to the spigot of the bulk tank. I spring the latch and wait.

Frank has to lean out of his own way to dig beneath his stomach for a side pocket. He drags out a tangled wad and sorts it. Frank has a lot of curly black hair, too much for a hair net.

Shower caps, paper hats from the veterinarian, even ladies’ rain bonnets from the dime store don’t work. For a while he wore a pink bathing cap, but his head broke out in a heat rash.

Frank is a very sweaty man. His round face glistens like cheese. He keeps handkerchiefs in both back pockets to mop his forehead and to sponge beneath his chins. It was his mother who suggested the wig caps. He lives with her and she has a dresser drawer full. He pulls one on now, so low that it squishes his face shut. “Ready to pull off this caper?”

I laugh because I like him and because I’m ready. “After you,” I say, lifting the milk hose door. He gives me a snort and plucks at the top of his head so that his face falls out full fold.

Frank comes down from the milk truck backwards. Step by step his feet find one another.

His hand on the hoist bar is squeaking along. He takes his time. The truck bounces on its springs. There’s a ladder up the side of the long silver tank with a submarine hatch above it. I watch it in case any milk sloshes out.

“Go ahead, sweet-pea. I left it on for you.”

There’s a radio in the barn, but not in our house, and I’m not allowed in the barn, or the milk house, though I’ve watched Frank through its grimy window enough times to know what he does in there and he knows what I do in here. I make myself comfortable then scoot up again to roll the dial. I don’t really much care what I’m listening to, but I change the stations a lot. It’s the sinking back into Frank’s seat that feels good, like a bubble bath, if a bubble bath could smell like aftershave. There’s only one seat in the milk truck. It’s for the driver. Where the other one should be, sits a cooler full of butter and cheese. If we take some, it comes out of the milk check.

Once he’s on the ground, Frank is sure-footed and quick. He lifts the heavy hose, threading its silver nose into the milk house, and steps inside at the side door to tug it through. He picks coverall out of his behind when he thinks I can’t see him.

My father doesn’t want me in the milk house or barn because he doesn’t want me any place and never wanted me at all. That’s what I learned from Time-Life Books without ever reading one. Girls belong in the house. That’s his excuse. Doesn’t he know Mom’s a girl?

Sometimes I wonder, she says.

Frank whistles while he works. He’s come back outside to flip on the pump of his truck.

“Hey, Frank, a puddle of glue hardened up in my desk and it looked just like a rabbit.”

“That so?”

“I forgot to close it after my insect poster. Do you know houseflies lay 150 eggs at a time?”

“You don’t say.”

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“They hatch into maggots in just one day and make a cocoon called a pupa in five.”

“Is that right?”

“A few days later, when the fly comes out, it stays the same size until it dies.”

“Well, what do you know about that.” Frank stands a moment blotting his face before heading back inside.

The female housefly’s lifetime supply of eggs is fertilized in a single split-second. Happens all the time. Two flies land beside one another and explode. It’s a buzzing you don’t need to hear twice to know what it means. They’re easier to swat while they’re at it, because they’re weak and dizzy. Small flies are not babies, they’re just underfed. Mothers of fat flies secreted them well.

I wrap my arms around the warm steering wheel and rock it to a song about rain. Frank’s windshield is clean as the sky without a raincloud in sight. I’m staring at the ass-end of Rodney, looking at what the cousins call his nuts. Rodney has muskmelons dropped inside him, same as we hang onions in old nylons from the rafters of our cellar. He’s bumpy there, but moist as an orange and alive.

Rodney eats his way around the farm all summer. Under the crab apple trees. Next to the garden. Around the sinkhole out in the oat field where the tractor can’t go and in a patch of grass beneath the windmill. He has a heavy silver ring in his nose. I’ve watched him spin it, snaking his black tongue up one nostril, then twisting and hunching it like a giant leech, until his ring begins to roll like it’s moving on its own. A fat chain connects the ring in Rodney’s nose to another one just like it on his stake post. Mom must have left it down by the water tank.

Rodney’s sides are swollen heavy. He’s angling to turn around. I watch his heavy sack swing between the pointed bones of his backward knees. He flicks his ears once or twice to shoo away flies and swings his rump away so that I’m looking at the side of him. He’s lined up behind that heifer, waiting his turn in line to stick his nose under the board fence and stretch his tongue out into the garden. He stares at nothing while he waits.

I’m not afraid of Rodney, but I’m glad there’s a fence between us, that he’s boxed into the barnyard, and the only way out is a latched gate. He flares his nostrils, gathering in the smell of alfalfa too wet to rake, but Rodney’s in no hurry to reach the strawberry bed. It’s summer. He’s bored and unbothered. The whole world is green. He’s content to be where he is doing nothing. Me too.

I don’t even mind that the song on the radio has no words.

Rodney snorts, swinging his anvil head above that heifer’s rear end like he means to move downhill, but his jawbone catches between the sharp sails of her hips. He stumbles, then barrels forward upon her. His thin ankles tremble to find their center. The towering bulk of his shoulders bend that heifer in half. She curtsies and shuffles. Rodney’s forelegs dangle like useless arms. One step too many, and her throat is thrust up against the rough fence, halter tightening at her lashed muzzle. Her lip is caught. Folded back from stubby teeth. Pink tongue thrashing. A lather of slobber piles up and her eyes are bulging, wrenched back to look inside her own head, but she doesn’t make a sound.

A twitching stalk slips out of Rodney—shiny as peeled horseradish, bright as rhubarb, sharp as new asparagus—rooted in the frayed cuff where his piss pounds out. It swings, searching the full-length of his belly, as his chin scoots up the ramp of the heifer’s spine. He rests his throat between her shoulders and lets his gaze sweep lazily across the garden, ignorant of his own heaving belly.

My father doesn’t want me in the milk house or barn because he doesn’t want me any place and never wanted me at all.

That’s what I learned from TimeLife Books without ever reading one. Girls belong in the house.

That’s his excuse.

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I

’m about to blow Frank’s horn to scare Rodney off when Mom walks out of the milk house carrying a bucket full of berries. She’s talking, but I can’t hear her over the pump motor and low-groaning gurgle that means the bulk tank is almost empty. Frank steps out behind her. They don’t look at me, sitting up here in the truck, and they don’t look at Rodney, dropping from that heifer and snorting snot onto the ground. And I don’t look at them, but I see them, in the tall side-mirror of Frank’s truck.

Frank flips off the pump switch and leans against his silver bullet tank. Mom chatters on about pies. He should be dragging out the milk transfer hose, but she is crinkling her eyes against the sun and tilting her head, exposing her long soft neck. She tucks a curl behind her ear and lingers at its lobe, twisting it like a mama cat’s nipple when a blind new kitten doesn’t latch on. Frank tugs off the wig cap and stuffs it in his pocket. The moment his hand comes back she snatches it. He clutches his clipboard tight to his chest. A sting so slight I barely see it pricks my mother’s face. She swings the handle of her ice-cream bucket onto his fleshy palm and closes his fingers upon it.

“The plumpest ones,” she says, leaning in like it’s a secret, “are the sweetest.”

Frank looks past her, embarrassed or dizzy, and my mother laughs. A waspish tightness darkens the sound. She reaches below Frank’s belly, where the bucket wobbles against his thigh, and peels its lid back with a slow ripping sound. She fishes out a strawberry and hikes herself up on tiptoe to bring it to his mouth. Frank’s lips go rubbery and wobble with his chins. He’s staring over her shoulder at the milk house when he bites the berry between her fingers. His face is the color of quicklime. A dribble of juice stains the front of his coveralls.

I can’t look.

“You tell your mother,” I hear her say, “the trick to growing strawberries like that is to thin out the bed so isn’t overcrowded, you hear?” Gravel crunches. Mom’s walking off like she told somebody, and the milk hose clatters its tin doorway. Hand over hand Frank is reeling it in.

S

tiff calves pile up like cordwood all winter. They limber up in springtime, thawing in prettily coated heaps. There are two dead calves in the manure spreader. Propped beside them is a sad shovel.

These calves died in June and never hardened at all. Their graceful little legs fold delicately, this way and that, and their ears are soft and sweet. They have long pretty eyelashes and glacier-blue eyes. Their hips jut out, but in the middle they’re flat as a hide, with fur that is curly in places, the way it gets when mothers lick them. Their own pink tongues loll between milk teeth. Nobody notices these teeth when they’re alive. Cows, even baby ones, don’t smile.

I bury them in junk. Tin cans. Glass jars. Plastic bottles. A whole year’s worth. The first half goes quick and I lean like a winded farmer should on the handle of a wide-bottomed shovel. It makes me sad to think how this shovel is for corn and oats, things that some things never taste, but calves die all the time. Maybe their mothers drop them too soon. Maybe they strangle on the way out. Maybe they freeze to death before reaching the barn. Maybe they drown in a creek or get eaten by bobcats or wolves. Maybe. But usually, they just get the scours and shit themselves to death. It doesn’t matter. Their mothers won’t know. They’ll keep on making milk no matter who needs it.

No telling what this junk shed was, when it was new, long ago. It’s two-stories tall but has only one floor. There used to be a half-floor like a porch that had moved inside. Its leg poles weren’t pretty, just regular barn posts, with cobwebs. My father knocked it down because it was wobbly and served no purpose. One of the aunts thought this might have been a summer kitchen, where women took the heat when they couldn’t stand it in the kitchen. But Mom said, where’s the chimney

I bury them in junk. Tin cans.

Glass jars. Plastic bottles. A whole year’s worth. The first half goes quick and I lean like a winded farmer should on the handle of a wide-bottomed shovel. It makes me sad to think how this shovel is for corn and oats, things that some things never taste, but calves die all the time.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

then? and nobody could answer. It’s not a root cellar, they said, its windows would make the potatoes go bad. That made no sense to me. Ours go bad all the time in a cellar without any windows. Potatoes will let their eyes grow no matter where you put them. The uncles ruled out a buggy shed, because the door is just a door. But it had to be for something, set next to the house like this, and up against an old road like that. Maybe it was just a junk shed. Maybe back in the olden days even country folks had somebody else to come pick up their trash.

T

he barn door slides open. I hear it rumble as I close the latch. My parents are done with milking chores and I am done with mine. Just in time. She’ll come down to start dinner and he’ll climb onto this tractor, to spit our junk out, close to the sinkhole as he can get it.

Then we’ll sit again at the table and feel the light of day lift from us.

When it’s dark, I’ll burn the paper trash. Cereal and macaroni boxes. Empty flour and sugar sacks. Calf powder bags brought down from the barn. And junk mail. All layered beneath a maple tree and soaked with gasoline. I’ll light a kitchen match.

Jacquelyn Thomas recently returned to the Driftless Area, after living more than thirty years in a Madison housing project where she served as director of an on-site community learning center.

Her non-fiction work has been published by Proximity Magazine and is forthcoming in the spring issue of Fourth Genre as runner-up in the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest.

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

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Fiction

CONGRATULATIONS

TO OUR 2020 FICTION & POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

FICTION WINNERS

POETRY WINNERS

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

Jacquelyn Thomas Dodgeville “Junk Shed”

Jennifer Morales Viroqua “Wiseacres”

Barbara Kriegsmann Sister Bay “Without Provisions”

Susan Martell Huebner Mukwonago “1967”

Kathryn Gahl Appleton “Sister”

Dominic W. Holt Monona “Liquirizia”

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS

“Headfirst,” Kata Beilin – Madison “little blind flying mice,” Steve Fox – Hudson “Mazo,” Mary Ellen Gabriel – Madison “Nefertiti in the Afternoon,” Karen Loeb – Eau Claire “What’s Best,” Andrew McDonnell – Beaver Dam “I Touched Leviathan,” Jeff Snowbarger – Stevens Point “Morrow’s Nut House After Hours,” Allison Uselman – Madison

“At the Birth of a Third Daughter, On the Eve of World War,” Ingrid Andersson – Madison “Bleu Blew Azul,” S.M. Blakeley – Beloit “Of Many Wings,” Rachel Durfee – Madison “I Want to Speak of Want,” Elisabeth Harrahy – Oconomowoc “Brown Study,” Dawn Hogue – Sheboygan “He Screams,” Jackie Langtieg – Verona “In Which Woolly Mammoths Save the World, Starting with Siberia, Because Permafrost is Melt and Carbon is Release,” Jill Madden Melchoir – Green Bay “Village Post Office,” Melaney Poli – White Lake “Thermos,” Guy Thovaldsen – Madison

JOIN US

Join us on Thursday, October 29, at 5:00 pm for a special online Wisconsin Book Festival reading with our 2020 contest winners at wisconsinacademy.org/2020reading.

THANKS TO OUR 2020 CONTEST JUDGES Chloe Benjamin (fiction) and Oscar Mireles (poetry), as well as to preliminary readers CX Dillhunt and Jodi Vander Molen. All contest judging is done blindly and the winning submissions are selected on criteria established by individual judges.

CONTEST WINNERS RECEIVE CASH AND PRIZES 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 in Mineral Point.

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THANKS TO OUR 2020 CONTEST SPONSORS:

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Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry 1967

2020

It was that summer 19 years old I lived alone fevered with independence efficiency apartment on Summit Avenue scratch cushions pull-out couch Goodwill dishes my boyfriend and I drank liquor from jelly glasses pounded the thin mattress even flatter ignored the metal frame bruising our backs It was that summer freedom meant working Wisconsin Bell Telephone Company long distance operator 26th & Highland on the roof men with rifles protecting the communications center claimed danger of rioting a takeover IDs required in the lobby no one spoke on the elevators the cafeteria on break cut corn and meatloaf slabs steaming on shiny white plates I squirted ketchup a co-worker slapped spoonful of mayonnaise when I asked she said lots of us use mayo and us meant black people and even though she always carried a paperback just like me us also meant different foreign It was that summer when the three men who rented an apartment above mine thundered down the stairs heavy boots helmets camouflage rifles combat-ready National Guard my neighbors maybe the same men who jumped into the road guns shouldered at Reservoir Park a checkpoint for entering or leaving the city to discourage another claim marauding bands of armed men.

It was that summer when throwing rocks and curses was 30 seconds on the six o’clock news and sunlight burned the asphalt on the 16th Street Viaduct

Susan Martell Huebner

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Poetry

Bedtime Quitapenas* When your thoughts twist in swirls and spirals When your mind drills down into grainy quicksand And your fears range reckless on the backs of ponies Invite them all to rest beside a whispering fir-lined pool Allow your Soul to fly a kite against the blue-dark sky for under your pillow a Worry Doll will grab its tail and string you along toward the sleepy stars

Susan Martell Huebner *Muñecas Quitapenas—Guatemalan worry dolls

Susan Martell Huebner’s poetry has appeared many times in several formats, the most recent being in the anthology Leaves of Peace, published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and her chapbook Reality Changes with the Willy Nilly Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She also has an essay in Re-Creating Our Common Chord (Wising Up Press, 2019). Huebner lives in Mukwonago with her husband and two cats, one skinny and one not.

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Poetry

Sister My sister doesn’t do sad.

She tried it on a few times, different styles, different sizes— nothing quite fit. Either too loud

or too dark, too tight or too baggy, she’d say.

But I think it was the silence of sadness she couldn’t size up.

See, she’s a musician and she hears B major the happiest of notes in her pink roses and she weeded out E flat minor (the saddest) from between the beans because she lives

in the key of wonder.

When I was little, I watched her practice piano on the windowsill before we got the upright and now her fingers glide on the bass clarinet and she loves parades and dogs and actors on stage.

She bakes toffee bars, chimes in at book club, and will call you on the phone checking in with perfect timing and then when it gets too quiet she will sit at her kitchen table and hand-write a letter to a prisoner so when it is opened, her cursive flows like a cello deep and smooth making a little cell swell words rise from the page like high notes of a flute measure by measure my sister’s drum roll of love

piercing the silence there.

Kathryn Gahl

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Poetry

Angel of Simplicity Simplicity was the pattern-maker

onionskin we would cut/cut/cut

for bodice skirt and waistband the sleeve of the future, my mother said enrolling me and my sisters in the Cleveland Merry Masters 4–H Club where we learned to sew flat-fell seams, gather skirts, line plackets design a time to do something do you know what it was why did it take so long to find it was I asking the wrong question or was it simply

(a derivative of sim-pli-city) how I feared to ask that or more since my mother would harrumph past the ironing board on her way to the washing machine and call me argumentative while I begged her to stop working sit down talk with me or at least buy me a dictionary

so I could look up argumentative

Kathryn Gahl’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in many journals and several anthologies and have won awards from Glimmer Train, Margie, and Wisconsin People & Ideas, as well as the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. Her most recent release is The Velocity of Love (Water’s Edge Press, 2020), a poetic memoir. When not playing with words, cooking, or yielding to yoga, Gahl dances red-hot ballroom. Her website is kathryngahl.com.

Kathryn Gahl

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Poetry

Liquirizia* Tell me Grandfather did you ever try to scrub out your dark Mediterranean skin your Camels original Napolitano tongue at home at night while your family slept did you spiral and spiral about tomorrow like I do you tailoring for Louisville’s white Southerners and I white white trying to unwind the fire white devils who snake into our brains from the time we can see we can hear we can taste taste this licorice spice of privilege and have no idea.

Dominic W. Holt *Liquirizia means “licorice” in Italian

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Poetry

When the Wall Clouds Come We were married in the interludes of thunderstorms. June.

Blacktop hot. The rose bushes arced in the driving sun.

I was steaming in my Michael Kors black suit that, days later, I would wear to my father’s funeral. We waited and waited crossing our wires, messengers to and from her dressing room, a classroom in the MSU Rose Garden Visitor Center. “Go or no go?” as Doppler radar flickered red rotating vectors. I jarred the crowd “Holy …! Finally, here she comes!” when Heather and entourage marched out to the courtyard. The torrents and lightning lulled, broke the ninety-five-degree heat and electricity to Aunt Dorothy’s keyboard, my brother-in-law’s microphone. Under an umbrella my brother held, the officiant clenched purse to tummy, visibly pissed she was amid drizzle. Hit a car on the way in, her husband said when I called because she was late. I was wet to the boxers.

Heather blushed pink impatiens, rugosa rose with so many eyes on her. Her fingers jittery as sleet. We shouted our vows, paper dimpled with drops. She was sweating too in her ivory Victorian gown. The slopes of her satin shawl smooth as icing on our vanilla raspberry cake inside. No veil. No train. She wanted us to wait until anyone could marry. Like high school sweethearts Josh and Scott standing paces apart in the groomsmen line, hands to themselves, as if by instinct. Or my jazz drumming cousin, Dennis,

Dominic W. Holt is a poet and macro social worker (public policy and outreach) in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Lunch Ticket, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, Plainsongs, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Driftwood Review, Lifeboat, Poetry Quarterly, and other venues.

and his partner, Mark, a middle school principal, sitting without touching, while other couples held each other close. Felt like hail piercing my neck to see this. I pushed us to marry. Had a hunch.

Like birds, day or night, sense the magnetic field of the world and know the way home, when the wall clouds come.

Dominic W. Holt

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J U D G E’S N OTES

Mich e ll e S t o c k er

OSCAR M I RELES 1967 I thought “1967” really captured the feelings and sentiment of the late 1960s as well as highlighting the emotions behind what’s happening right now in our country. It captures the free spirit of being nineteen again—old enough to begin to understand life but not having enough puzzle pieces to figure it all out. I lived in Milwaukee for a decade and many of the locations referenced were some of my familiar stomping grounds.

Sister Sisterhood is an amazing experience when one of the sisters can step back and take it in—the glory of it all as well as the other side, the heartache. Using music as a metaphor for emotion is tricky, but the poet does it very well here. Writing is the process of piercing the silence, and this poem captures this idea perfectly.

Liquirizia Looking to past generations of our families for the answers is a great way to begin to understand our place in the world. The notion of skin color is a highly charged issue and can quickly lead the reader in directions the author never intends. But this poem gracefully asks the question and lets us try to figure out the answer.

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REVIEWS

Maids: Poems

by Abby Frucht Matter Press, 88 pages, $14.95 Reviewed by Karla Huston

Maids is Abby Frucht’s first collection of poetry, and, as she says on her website, probably her last. Too bad for us, because this nationally known author and essayist has put together an astonishing collection that has been named a finalist for a slew of prizes, including the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and the Marie Alexander Poetry Series.

In these prose poems—essentially, little stories—Frucht’s narrator recalls the women who were hired to clean and do kitchen work in her parents’ house when she was a girl living on Long Island during the ’60s and ’70s. Most of the maids are women of color, such as Ida and Della, who are both “fired/let go,” terms the six-year-old doesn’t understand. But there is also the slender, fair-skinned, redheaded maid from Finland, “her face tranquil as teacups.”

The maid with the most resonance is Cynthia, who lives in the little room upstairs with the vacuum cleaner. The narrator recalls how Cynthia’s “reedy clarinet voice squeaked when she cried” as she thought about her daughter, Wanda, a little girl the same age as the narrator. Cynthia left Wanda in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to work in the United States, and she sends her salary home so Wanda can become a doctor. Eventually Cynthia is fired for crying too much and sent back home. The narrator often wonders about Wanda, and later as an adult even tries to find her.

While Frucht is the consummate storyteller, what is startling and stunning about these poems is her use of imagery, her play with time, and her disruption of language, all of which cause readers to back up and go forward, never quite sure of their footing. These disruptions, though frustrating at times, deepen the meaning and perhaps reflect the narrator’s struggle to grapple with her privileged upbringing, as in this passage from “Occasionally”: Occasionally what irks her is the question of syllables since doctor’s daughter has too many while she has too few not to mention commas bug her because they cause a divide between halves of a thought parts of a recollection figments of emotion no more appealing than mosquitoes they buzz in the middles of things they have no business punctuating and in addition metaphors.

It is the limited use of punctuation that gives these poems their power. The reader is asked to read and consider again what it is the narrator is telling her.

Time is fluid in these poems. The now-adult narrator slips into contemplating the racial divisions found in the Long Island of her youth, comparing them to her understanding of race in present-day Oshkosh, and then returns to the past to consider why she had no Black friends when growing up. Identity and privilege come up again and again: She is no longer “the doctor’s daughter,” but, rather, a newly divorced woman with a hysterectomy and breast cancer in her future—a future that “will make rather / a mess of some parts of her self.”

Yet humor is a sword Frucht uses to pierce the veil of racism and classism that hangs over her childhood.

Unlike rust tarnish is self limiting. Whatever. The doctor’s daughter has no clue what self limiting means perhaps … tarnish is unable to stop itself from tarnishing from not letting one see what is required to be seen in it to be understood by seeing it such as really it doesn’t matter so much the spirit in which something happens that it happens at all.

What shines through these dazzling poems is the voice of a person who is trying to transcend her learned sense of class, of racism and status. These poems will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them.

Karla Huston is a former Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2017–2018) and the author of eight chapbooks of poems, the latest of which is Grief Bone, (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her collection A Theory of Lipstick won a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and her poems have garnered three Jade Rings from the Wisconsin Writers Association.

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REVIEWS

In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams

by Thomas Davis All Things that Matter Press, 381 pages, $18.99 Reviewed by Gary Jones

Tourists celebrate Door County’s Washington Island for its majestic scenery and Scandinavian heritage. But Thomas Davis’ new novel, In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, reveals the island’s lesser known history as an 1850s refuge for runaway African American slaves. According to Davis, the history surrounding a slave settlement on the island is fragmentary at best. But he was so captivated by the idea that he put aside plans for an academic local history in order to pursue a semi-fictional narrative about the escape of two families from neighboring plantations in Missouri. For In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, Davis draws from his own research on the Underground Railroad and escaped slaves to imagine an account of how, with the guidance of two freed slaves, the families make their trek north to the island where they form a community and learn to support themselves as commercial fishermen.

Davis weaves together several narrative elements to create a compelling plot. Readers experience the story from the perspective of the protagonist Joshua, a fourteen-year-old slave for whom the risky adventure serves as a coming of age. Early on in the story, Joshua considers the possibility of escape and a life beyond the fields of the plantation: He had heard rumors of a conductor on the Underground Railroad whispered late at night in the quarters. Once his best friend, Jamie Bullock, had avowed if he ever had the chance, he would ride the railroad right off the plantation.

But Joshua had thought the conductor was supposedly a woman, not a preacher. He’d never asked anybody about the rumors. He suspected now that he not only had not understood what they meant, but that he had thought they were dreams people dreamed after they had been brutalized once too often by the Overseer.

Joshua’s journey to freedom brings him and his fellow pilgrims into contact with idealistic abolitionists and callous runaway-slave hunters, both of whom are dangerous in their own way. The leader of the group, Preacher Tom Bennett, functions not only as a guide for the trek north but also as a community organizer once they arrive on the island. Bennett leads the runaway slaves in their pioneering enterprise in an environment occasionally hostile with unfamiliar

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weather and not a few antagonistic neighbors. Davis’s realistic description of the slaves’ pilgrimage, along with the accounts of their self-reliance—raising buildings, organizing fishing expeditions, and creating a communal sense of purpose—captivate the reader.

Davis’s novel clearly draws both stories and inspirations from his life-long career serving Native American communities. His accomplishments include helping found the College of the Menominee Nation and serving as president of both Lac Courtes Oreilles Ojibwa Community College and of Little Priest Tribal College. Through his work with native populations, he has become well aware of the obstacles that marginalized people face and the challenges they must overcome.

Davis is also a published poet, and his prose reflects a keen sense of rhythm and timing. He originally considered telling this story through a sonnet sequence, as reported in a recent interview, but ultimately chose prose, utilizing sonnets to introduce and establish a tone for each chapter. This technique serves to underscore the epic nature of In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, a well-researched and fascinating tale of how this fugitive slave settlement changed—and didn’t change—the face of Wisconsin’s Door County.

Author and poet Gary Jones summers in Door County and winters in Platteville, where he teaches at UW–Platteville after a long career as a high school English instructor. In 2019 the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published his Ridge Stories: Herding Hens, Powdering Pigs, and Other Recollections from a Boyhood in the Driftless, which won first place in the biography category of the 2020 Midwest Book Awards.

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