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Wisconsin People & Ideas – Winter 2022

In this issue: Learn about the history and flavor of landjaeger, a unique fermented meat snack, with Jesse Brookstein. Steven Potter illustrates how graffiti artists and related businesses are breaking into the world of established art. Explore a story written in ancient ice and consider the importance of a good death. Get an exclusive preview of Emily Arthur’s Books, Prints, and Bronze Multiples, opening at the James Watrous Gallery, along with an exhibit she curated of Native American printmakers. And read the second-place story from the 2021 fiction contest, more honorable mention poems, and reviews of three new books by Wisconsin authors.

Volume:

Issue Number:

From the Director

From the (former interim) Director

By:

Jody Clowes

Taking time for reflection and re-examination

Editors Note

On Sturgeon Moons and Synchronicity

By:

Christopher Chambers

An opportunity like this only comes around once in a blue moon.

Landjaeger display at Bavaria Sausage in Fitchburg

Wisconsin Table

Landjaeger: Mispronounced, Misunderstood, and Delicious

By:

Jesse Brookstein

It’s fermented, cured, delicious, and often misunderstood and mispronounced. Perhaps you’ve seen them before and wondered what they were. Or you’ve seen them and never given them a second thought.

Essay

Breaking Into the Art World: Graffiti Gets Legit

By:

Steven Potter

Milwaukee muralist Aisha Valentín vividly remembers the first time she picked up a can of spray paint.

Thwaites (right) and a colleague digging a test pit in search of drift north of Bonduel, July 17, 1928. Image courtesy Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Essay

A Story Written in Ice: Reading Wisconsin’s Landscape

By:

Rudy Molinek

In much of the state, these rocks are hidden from view, covered by a deposit called “drift.” Understanding the nature and source of drift was one of the first strands of our landscape web that nineteenth century geologists needed to untangle....

Essay

A Good Death

By:

Keely Khoury

A good death means finding peace at the end of one’s life, and it is part of the beauty of the full cycle of life, something to strive for, for ourselves and for those we love.

@ the Watrous Gallery

Emily Arthur: Prints, Books, and Bronze Multiples

By:

Jody Clowes, Emily Arthur

This solo exhibition by artist Emily Arthur examines connections between seemingly unrelated events, past and present, to make visible the land as a living matter that holds a story.

Fiction

Everything Burns

By:

Kim Suhr

Before I step through the doors of the cigar factory, I smell the aroma that has followed my sister, Rosario, home since she started working here.

Book Review

The Birdman of Koshkonong: The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien by Martha Bergland

By:

Margaret Rozga

After writing Studying Wisconsin, a biography of Increase Lapham co-authored with Paul Hayes, Martha Bergland was looking for another Wisconsin scientist whose life and work deserved more attention.

Book Review

Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems by Margaret Rozga

By:

Angela Trudell Vasquez

Margaret Rozga’s latest collection consists of poems from three previous collections—200 Nights and One Day, Justice Freedom Herbs, Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems—as well as newer poems, some of which she wrote d

Book Review

A Door Opens by Richard Merelman

By:

Mark Zimmermann

Early in Richard Merelman’s poetry collection A Door Opens, a teenage boy appears surrounded by “A sea of images, language, / sensation” exploring sex and violence.