Your shopping cart is empty.

Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2017

In this issue: New Birkie Museum opens, Barstow & Grand lit mag launches, the Domes achieve landmark status, and aquaponics innovator Nelson & Pade puts Monticello on the map. World class chocolate made in Spooner is on the Wisconsin Table, and we report on mosquitos and mosquito-borne disease research in Wisconsin. Fairytales and folklore fuel the art of sculptor Gerit Grimm and painter Gina Litherland, whose work is showing at the James Watrous Gallery. Essays on finding a creative community and James Zwerg, Wisconsin's Freedom Rider, complement new fiction and poetry by Wisconsin writers as well as reviews of new and interesting titles.

Volume:

Issue Number:

From the Director

Grace, Beauty, and the American Experience

By:

Jane Elder

Why cut funding for programs that help rural and urban communities cultivate creativity as well as jobs?

Editors Note

On Essays

By:

Jason Smith

Let us consider the humble essay.

Happenings

Nelson & Pade

By:

Nivedita Sharma

Rebecca Nelson always had a passion for raising fish; by the time she was ten, her family’s home was filled with aquariums. Her partner, John Pade, grew up on a dairy farm, learning a lot about livestock and agriculture.

Photo credit: The Park People of Milwaukee County

Happenings

Mitchell Park Domes

By:

Nivedita Sharma

On March 22, 2017, the Washington DC-based National Trust for Historical Preservation granted “National Treasure” status to an iconic Milwaukee landmark: The Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory.

Happenings

Tony Wise Museum of the American Birkebeiner

By:

Jason Smith

America’s most-famous cross-country ski race now has its own museum.

Happenings

Barstow & Grand

By:

Jason Smith

Taking its name from a storied intersection in downtown Eau Claire, a new literary magazine called Barstow & Grand promises to be the perfect complement to the city’s burgeoning arts and culture scene.

Photo by Kara Vincent/karavincentart.com

Wisconsin Table

Sweet Surprise

By:

Shelby Deering

A husband-and-wife team in Spooner create world-class chocolate.

A female Aedes aegypti mosquito in the process of acquiring a blood meal from a human host. Photo credit: James Gathany/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Report

Formidable Flying Foe

By:

Silke Schmidt

Scientists from across the state are leading the fight against mosquito-borne disease around the world.

A "Freedom Bus" in flames, six miles southwest of Anniston, Alabama, May 14, 1961. (Birmingham Public Library/Oxford University Press)

Essay

Bus Ride

By:

B.J. Hollars

What could a 26-year-old white guy from Indiana possibly know about the black experience in America, past or present?

Essay

To the Quarry, Together

By:

C. Kubasta, Mollie Oblinger

When poets and visual artists work together, they negotiate a shared language.

Gina Litherland, Bird Funeral, 2015. Oil on panel, 16 x 24 inches.

@ the Watrous Gallery

The Fairytales of Grimm & Litherland

By:

Diane Bacha

Gerit Grimm and Gina Litherland are contemporary Wisconsin artists inspired by the imaginations of long ago.

Fiction

The Remedy of Fortune

By:

I.S. Kallick

Will often dreamed of falling, but never flying. Sometimes a cable would slip, or a board would snap, or his foot would step on air to tread on mere surprise.

Book Review

The Hearts of Men, by Nickolas Butler

By:

Jason Smith

Novelist Nickolas Butler isn’t afraid to tackle big ideas in his writing. His sophomore effort, set in and around the fictional Camp Chippewa in Northern Wisconsin, seeks to understand the weighty subject of its title: The Hearts of Men.

Book Review

The Transit of Venus, by Susan Firer

By:

Lisa Vihos

My measure of a poem’s quality is often found in the question, “How did the poet think of that?” If that poem should happen to begin an entire collection that has me asking that same question again and again, well, then I know I have something...

Book Review

The Biology of Consciousness, by Thomas J. Erickson

By:

Ronnie Hess

Thomas J. Erickson’s first full-length poetry collection, The Biology of Consciousness, stopped me dead in my tracks, even before I cracked the cover. What on earth could the book or its title poem mean?