Foreword

On the Move

2009-07-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

We've launched a new website with a content management system that hosts our blogs. Come find me and my new posts at madisonmagazine.com! Please? Pretty please? C'mon, it'll be fun. Promise.

Summer Reading

2009-07-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

Okay people, you are in for a treat.

In yet another attempt to avoid writing anything that requires me to miss out on the beautiful weather we’re having here in Wisconsin (minus today ... it’s a little brisk) I have pestered some of the nicest and most talented writers in the state, no, in the world, to find out what they are reading right now.

Dwight Allen, author of the newly released novel The Typewriter Satyr:

I have been reading the new translation of War and Peace, and given its length and my tendency to shut my eyes at ten at night, I will probably be reading it until at least the beginning of the second Obama Administration. I am almost finished with Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. I gave this novel to my son last Christmas, when he was in South America, and when he got back, he told me to read it. Vargas Llosa is a South American T. Coraghessan Boyle—antic, full of surprises. I recently read A. Manette Ansay’s Good Things I Wish You. (I reviewed it for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.) Ansay tries to answer the question of whether men and women can be friends, whether friendship can survive passion. She is a sure-handed storyteller. I am also reading In Love With Jerzy Kosinski, the new novel by my friend (and fellow Madisonian) Agate Nesaule. It’s about a Latvian woman living alone in Wisconsin, trying to find her way, after leaving her nutty control freak of a husband. It is written with great heart and quiet humor.

Well, speaking of Agate Nesaule: she tells me what she’s reading, too:

Here are two books I love. Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? is suspenseful, funny, and smart; it also deals with the serious theme of survival after extreme experiences. But I don’t believe I have been as head-over-heels in love with a character since I read Jane Eyre. Sixteen-year old orphan Reggie is brave, resourceful, loyal, and a terrific liar. I want to go live with Reggie, her employer Dr. Hunter, and the baby. Larry Watson’s Montana 1948 is a small jewel. It’s a short, compelling, and morally complex account of courage and of prejudice and crimes against Native Americans, which never once descends into racial stereotypes. The writing is beautifully nuanced and understated.

Soon after I received this e- from Agate I got a P.S. e-mail.

I should have said that I haven't been in love like that since I read Jane Eyre AND A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

And, incidentally, I am about to read Montana 1948 a second time just to see how Larry Watson does it.

I’m glad I got in touch with Dean Bakopoulous, author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, because I learned some news about a fascinating life change:

We’re in the process of moving to Iowa, and my wife and I are selling and/or giving away most of our stuff, burning our mortgage, and heading west. I’ve been inspired to do this, in part, by a classic book, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau, which made me hate most of my possessions and despise the idea of debt. It’s remarkably apt in the age of economic collapse. (The book was recently published in a very cool new “Great Ideas” series from Penguin Books.)

I’ll be joining the faculty at Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing & Environment. The great Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley recently retired from there, so, in hopes of getting some of that good karma, I’ve been reading Smiley’s wonderfully insightful Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, as well as her hilarious satire of academic life in the Midwest, Moo.

I was bummed when Dean moved from Madison to Mineral Point, but Iowa? At least it’s for all the right reasons:

Meanwhile, I found David Marannis, whose most recent work is Rome 1960, “happily enjoying these beautiful Madison days” at his home on the near west side:

I’m reading a collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. I had just read an interview with her in Granta magazine that made me want to read her, and I’ve not been disappointed. The stories are amazing. Other than that, I’m reading books on Kenya, Chicago, and Indonesia for my next book, a multigenerational biography of Barack Obama.

Just reading up on some books for his next biography on Obama. Um, wow.

Me? What am I reading? How nice of you to ask. I recently put down The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. I have an old dog who also may have to be put down soon and if you’ve read the book I think you know where I’m going with this. So I switched to non-fiction, which doesn’t inflict as much emotional damage on me even when a real human dies. I’m now back to reading Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg. Writer Frank Bures gave it to me and for a while I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment to us both or a subtle hint to switch careers. Perkins is the guy who discovered F. Scott Fitgerald, among other famous American authors of the early-to-mid 20th century. I’m obviously hoping to learn how he did it so I can discover and edit more talented writers like Frank. It’s a great biography and literary history and I haven’t cried once.

So, what are you reading this summer?

Blog More, Sun Less

2009-07-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

Who on earth can blog when it’s beautiful outside? When your kid’s room needs a fresh coat of purple paint? When you’re trying to re-launch a magazine website?

Well, Madison Magazine contributing writer Maggie can. But she has a room of her own and ads on her blogs. That’s blogs-zzz ... plural. Here's the other one. She's the founder and moderator.

Style editor Shayna can, because fashion and style wait for no one. Meanwhile she’s still managed to work on her tan. Outside. In a stylish swimsuit to be sure.

Mad Mag food writer Dan Curd can, though he’s also a master of Facebook and Twitter and all things PR and marketing—so he doesn’t count because he’s way out of my league. He's probably grilling ribs with one hand and posting the recipe with the other as we speak. Jerk.

C3K sports fan Jeff Robins blogs even when he’s in pain—as noted in his most recent posting. Here's the thing about fans of anything, though (especially sports). FAN is short for FANATIC.

I have no doubts that associate editor Katie Vaughn will blog soon. She was on vacation so we’ll give her a break (see above note on beautiful weather) because she is one of the best and most disciplined arts journalists in the city. And because Art Fair On the Square (and Off!) is this weekend and she won’t want you to miss it.

I can’t prove this (which is why it’s in the blog and not the magazine) but I’m pretty sure northern clime bloggers are more dedicated and prolific. One can only snowshoe so much before one’s tootsies freeze and one must head inside to drink brandy and post a blog about it. If, in Madison, Wisconsin, seductively warm days came around more often, we’d probably have to hand over our “most wired city per capita” crown to Ann Arbor. That or take up tweeting en masse from the Memorial Union Terrace.

Have I mentioned—in my blog I finally got around to posting—how beautiful it is outside?

The Green Scene

2009-06-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Veronica Rueckert of Wisconsin Public Radio was broadcasting live from Custer, Wisconsin, during my morning commute. She’s covering the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, which bills itself as “the nation’s premier energy education event.”

Rueckert’s guests were the folks from Inn Serendipty, an environmentally conscious B&B near Monroe in southwestern Wisconsin that operates on solar and wind energy. The proprietor couple, who quit their Chicago careers to live off the land, also grow seventy percent of the food they and their guests consume. Imagine your grocery expenses if your garden out back provided you and your family with nearly three quarters of your three squares a day—year-round. That’s impressive.

The couple, Lisa Kivirist and John Ivanko, also write about their experiences in ECOpreneuring, Rural Renaissance, and Edible Earth, a book of essays mixed with vegetarian recipes.

At one point during the show, Ivanko talked about how humans shouldn’t have or need landfills because nature doesn’t have or need landfills and it really made me think, what if? I’m so grateful these conversations are happening in the mainstream, over the airwaves and in books and schools and on blogs…

Speaking of blogs, my previous post brags about how much free stuff editors get. Here’s three books with green themes that have found their way to my desk recently, though I feel it my journalistic duty to point out that they weren't delivered on foot or by horseback so their carbon footprint isn’t zero.

Vegan Brunch: Homestyle recipes worth waking up for (Lifelong Books, $19.95) by Isa Chandra Moskowitz of Portland, Oregon. Curry scrambed tofu with cabbage and caraway, anyone? I'm being serious. It sounds really good.

Cooking Green: Reducing your carbon footprint in the kitchen (Lifelong Books, $17.95) by Kate Heyhoe of Austin, Texas. Did you know “Americans throw out 27 percent of all food available for consumption”? Good to know the old “Clean your plate, children are starving in Africa” line I stole from my mom is as pertinent as ever.

The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, how to keep animals happy, save Old MacDonald’s farm, reduce your hoofprint, and still eat meat (Lifelong Books, $24) by Catherine Friend of Minnesota. I haven’t cracked the spine on this one because I’m still recovering from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Please pass the tofu.

American Girl Goodies

2009-06-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Magazine editors get a lot of free stuff: beer, wine and liquor, music CDs and movie DVDs, bath and body products, jewelry and invitations to grand openings with complimentary food and drink. Marketing and publicity departments shower us with all these goodies, hoping for what’s known in the business as “earned media.” I swear that's what it's called.

While these attention-grabbing gifts are fun when the envelopes and boxes show up on my desk, I usually pass them on to other writers and editors who might actually include them in an article. When the goodies box is food-related, we invite the whole staff to taste test the product with us. The wine-infused ice cream from Metcalfe’s Sentry was a welcome late-afternoon treat. And the gourmet cupcakes from the new bakery/café on the east side were out of this universe.

Once or twice a year I receive a box of new books from American Girl in nearby Middleton and founded by Pleasant Rowland. While most Madisonians know Rowland as one of the city’s leading arts philanthropists (along with her husband, Jerry Frautschi) and the brains behind our beloved Concerts on the Square, she made her fortunes building a business that caters to the wholesome hearts and minds of little girls. The historical character dolls and educational books and products are a refreshing antidote to Barbies and Bratz Girlz, whose anatomically impossible body parts and purposely misspelled words help turn out sassy, body conscious teenyboppers rather than smart, confident young women. Just sayin'.

The latest American Girl offerings include a new doll, Rebecca Rubin, who joins a terrific collection spanning American history from 1764 to 1974. Rebecca also stars in a six-book series about growing up as a first-generation Jewish immigrant in New York City in 1914. In Meet Rebecca, readers are introduced to an adventurous young girl with a flair for the dramatic whose parents and grandparents were among the mass exodus of Jews from an increasingly prejudiced Eastern Europe. The book is well-written and beautifully illustrated and, like all the American Girl dolls, historically accurate right down to the stoop she and her four siblings likely lingered on outside the family’s front door on the Lower East Side.

“The most enjoyable part of preparing to write the stories was spending several days in New York City…,” writes author Jacqueline Dembar Green. “We walked the streets that would have been part of Rebecca’s world. We toured the cramped apartments preserved by the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, were invited into a period apartment like Rebecca’s fictional one, and toured the Coney Island Museum.”

Another youth novel newly released is the latest in American Girl’s mystery series. In Clues in the Shadows by Middleton author Kathleen Ernst, World War II-era’s Molly is the main character out to catch the troublemaker wreaking havoc on the Red Cross drive she volunteers for.

What I love most about the AG books—and what most girls probably like least—is the “Looking Back” history essays at the end of every book that provide more context to the setting in which the stories take place. The Molly mystery essay explains how the government enlisted all Americans, not just soldiers, in the war effort, from children’s volunteer drives to women working outside the home for the first time. Rebecca’s “Looking Back” essay includes a glossary of Yiddish terms used throughout the book. Reading them felt like I was back in high school reading Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick rather than the real Moby Dick, without the guilt.

The Rebecca doll and book series was released this past Sunday, the same day my daughter turned eight, so I took Meet Rebecca and the rest of the AG shipment home for her to be my “taste-tester." She is now, as my husband likes to say, "in the wheelhouse" of American Girls' target age range. True to form, my little sweet-tooth smiled at the Rebecca and Molly books, then went straight for the fun: the activity books the company does so well. Here’s a sampling.

Dazzling Desserts Dubbed “awesome” by my kiddo, this recipe and treat decorating book is, let me just say myself, SO COOL. It comes with five cookie cutters, including one in the shape of a cute little dress, and some of the coolest sprinkle, spread, color, cut and devour ideas ever.

Is This Normal? Girls’ questions, answered by the editors of The Care & Keeping of YOU is a Dear Abby Q&A for the eight-to-twelve “tween” set. “Look, Mom: advice for nail biters!” my daughter yelped. Sadly, she was referring to MY nasty habit and proceeded to read me the sage advice about doodling, squeezing a stress ball, and other fixes. They don’t work, but then again I didn’t have this book for counsel when I was gnawing away in second grade.

a smart girl’s guide to her parents’ divorce Unfortunately, I didn’t have this book as a kid either, and thumbing through the contents, I see I could’ve used a chapter or two when divorce happened to me—even as a grown-up college kid. I have to say that I was impressed that AG doesn’t shy away from the really rough and often scary issues that can surround a family split. The book tackles fathers who leave and don’t come back and domestic violence. The final page is a wonderful “girl’s bill of rights” that touches on the books mains themes of staying healthy, safe and happy—and most of all, trusting your instincts.

Good stuff. And for me: free!

Cancer is a Total Bitch

2009-05-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I headed south of the border with a bag full of goodies for one of my best friends and her two kids. For Ann the Eldest, I packed hand-me-down princess purses and a dolphin charm for the bracelet I gave her when she was baptized. When Ann’s mom Sarah asked my husband and I to be Ann’s godparents, she joked we’d provide the agnostic view from above—the “above” being liberal Madison north of their Chicago suburb. For Kyle the Youngest I came bearing a Scoobie Doo DVD. I almost brought him a Packer T-shirt, too, but I decided not to offend my gracious hosts.

On the way down I stopped at the Border’s in Schaumberg (yes, it’s right next to Ikea) and bought my friend Sarah a terrific new book, Cancer is a Bitch, by Madison author Gail Konop Baker. When the book came out last fall, I wasn’t ready to read it. Cancer is a bitch, I thought to myself. I certainly didn’t need a memoir to convince me. Then last February, Sarah called me in tears. “I have breast cancer.”

She’s my age: thirty-eight. I honestly didn’t know what to do with the fear and frustration that came over me. So I grabbed Gail’s book from the cluttered little shelf that is my bedside table and devoured her story in a single afternoon. It was like chicken soup for the sad friend’s soul.

Later, when I interviewed Gail for this blog, she wasn’t surprised that I had found comfort in her book—sisters and friends of survivors were reacting the same way. What surprised her, though, is that another audience had found its way to her book, and the blog that led up to it.

“The diagnosis crystallized a lot of stuff women face mid-life,” Gail says. “The book brought it out like a strong reduction sauce.”

The memoir’s themes of age, marriage, family and relationships caught her publisher’s attention as well. Read on for where Gail’s writing career is headed next.

The book explores your marriage pretty explicitly. What’s that been like for your husband and family? When I started writing the column, he said, “Just please change the names,” because he felt like it would be better for the kids. Now we go out and everybody calls him ‘Mike’ (the name of his character in the book).

I love how many Madison references you use. Getting that sense of place is really always important to me as a writer.

What’s it been like since the book came out? Nothing like I imagined. I really didn’t expect to launch with a memoir because I’d written fiction forever, and certainly not a breast cancer memoir. You just don’t plan these things. There’s a bittersweet quality, where I had to suffer through this to get that kick that got me launched. After the column and the book contract, I thought, “Do I really want to stand up and be the woman who had breast cancer?”

It’s turned out to be such a blessing in disguise. Not only do I have this new, exciting wonderful career, I’m doing patient advocacy. I hear from survivors who tell me my words help them feel less alone, and it gives them courage facing surgery. That never would’ve happened if I had launched with a fiction career.

But it’s still hard.

At a recent book reading, my son and husband were in the audience. I feel like I’m retraumatizing all of us. On the other hand, when patients and survivors come up and thank me, this is what I’m giving back. I do believe that cancer is a last-standing taboo in that you say the word and there is a stigma. So if I can stand up here and wear that label it helps someone else.

Last fall when the book was coming out Andrew [her youngest of three children] kept riding down to Borders to see if the book was there. Then he calls me from his cell phone, “Mom, I’m standing at the front table and I’m holding the book. You’ve gotta come down here.” He’s looking at me and the book and me and the book. And he said, “You know mom, you really turned this thing around didn’t you.”

How has it affected your two college-age daughters? A woman can launch herself mid-life in the midst of something so scary. A woman can do that. Now I’m traveling, I’m being interviewed all over the place. I was on Dr. Oz!

What about some of the characters in the book that didn’t always come off as friendly or supportive? I was open and honest but careful. I always erred on the side of kindness. In every situation that I recounted, it had to be accurate but when you write something you can tilt it in the way of kindness. Eleanor was a composite of three women. Everything that was said was true but I put into detail enough that they wouldn’t identify themselves. “Everyone knows an Eleanor.”

The book title, is, well, so right on! I didn’t have any of that writer’s distance. That’s why it reads very raw and intimate. When I read it again now I get choked up because it was so raw and unfiltered. Dr. Oz loved the title!

Was it difficult to write? I moved my pen across the page. It came out really fast. The columns I wrote over a period of months. The rest of it I wrote in four months. Getting it out on the page was very cathartic. And then playing with it—flipping the words and changing the phrases—felt like something I could control.

You’re very revealing about marriage, which can be a taboo subject, too. People have identified and thanked me for being so honest about marriage. My new book is about marriage. Somehow this whole thing did really make me re-examine my marriage. The working title is “Anatomy of a Marriage.” I conducted interviews. Every story is unique and universal. In every story there was a kernel that talked to me personally.

I’ve learned that what we think of as a typical or normal marriage doesn’t exist. We’re a wedding and a divorce culture. We don’t discuss a lot about that complicated thing called marriage and what it really looks and feels like. To not talk about it as a culture means we really need to talk about it. It’s a very moment-to-moment thing. People who aren’t married look at it as a monolithic thing.

Besides your marriage, what were some other “a-ha!” moments? It woke me up to the fact that now was the time in life I was always meant to live, to be the person I was always meant to be. I feel like I’m living with a stronger sense of purpose and urgency. When an opportunity would come up I could talk myself out of it. But I went from the why of everything to why not?

It’s had a dramatic impact on my life. Book, career, travel, a million more new experiences in the last year than in the last fifteen years combined. I’ve run two half-marathons; I’m running the Chicago Marathon in the fall; I’m getting my yoga certification. The fear of experience turned into a fearlessness.

Tell me about the normal writing process for you. Getting started is always the hardest thing for me. A lot of times I get physical. I get the pen. I like to write sensorally and a lot of that experience is feeling the pen in your hand and on the page. If I’m feeling stuck, I often pick up the pen. When you’re writing you shouldn’t be thinking. I think it’s important to move the pen across the page. There’s a parallel to running. A lot of times it’s just putting your shoes on and tying them and putting one foot in front of the other. If you’re not over-thinking it you don’t get stuck.

How do you know when you’re done with the book? It’s really hard and it’s done when you send it off to your editor. It’s kind of like sending your child off to school.

After a double mastectomy in April, Sarah started chemo this week. Cancer is definitely a bitch. But for the first time in six weeks, Sarah was able to pick up Kyle from his crib. He wrapped his legs around her waist, tucked his sweet little face into the well-worn groove between her neck and shoulder, and let out a primordial sigh of relief. Mother and child were both back home where they belonged. Cancer and all.

Getting the Watchdog Word Out

2009-05-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's the Midwest, so it can't possibly be beautiful out two weekends in a row. Plus, we have all summer to enjoy the outdoors. So why not join me for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Better Watchdog Workshop this weekend?

Great training, great speakers and great price -- just $20 for students ($40 pros) for Saturday, 9-5:30, $30 for 3 hours of optional hands-on computer-assisted reporting training on Sunday, 9 to noon. The online registration period is over but your fee will gladly be accepted Saturday on-site at Capital Newspapers.

The workshop includes 6 months of IRE membership.

Here's the official release. Join me!

IRE is bringing its Better Watchdog Workshop to Madison on May 9-10,
Saturday-Sunday.

Hosted by The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, The
Wisconsin State Journal, The Janesville Gazette, The Clarion and Madison
Area Technical College

Highlights:

* Producing quick-hit enterprise stories
* Tips on interviews and developing sources
* Bulletproofing stories
* Freedom of information laws and public records
* Using the Web effectively, including wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds

http://ire.org/training/watchdog/madison09schedule.html

To Belle and Back

2009-04-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

It must’ve been excruciating, not to mention overwhelming, to condense a hundred years of magazine writing into one publication. But the result, the May edition of The P rogressive, founded and still based right here in Madison and edited by the extremely smart and dedicated Matt Rothschild, is a masterpiece—not to mention a collector’s item.

A powerful cover image of a white dove whose trailing footprints stamp peace signs across the page is a powerful introduction to a remarkable collection of excerpts from dozens of writers, activists, politicians and intellectuals through the years. Regardless of your personal politics, this magazine is worth reading for its historical significance if not its raw and uncensored social, political and economic commentary. At times it’s heady stuff, and in the “history repeats itself” category, many of the essays can be bitter pills to swallow.

The Progressive does not, has never and will never mince words, which is why the next three days of conversation and celebration are going to be so well attended. Starting with a concert tonight and ending with a star-studded sendoff by Robert Redford himself on Saturday night, the magazine’s 100th-anniversary fete is chock full of anti-Establishment fun.

While the Sundance Kid will have the last word this weekend, Yoko Ono nabbed the last page of the anniversary issue. A full-page ad featuring a small billowy cloud floating in the clear blue sky below her signature message, “IMAGINE PEACE,” graces the magazine's back cover. It’s simple, subtle and stunning—and, I imagine, it covered a huge chunk of the production costs!

With today’s report by the Wisconsin Women’s Council on a continuing gender pay gap—77 percent here and 79.9 percent nationwide—it’s clear The Progressive’s seasoned voice crying out for equal justice for all is as valuable in 2009 as it was in 1909. I’m sure the magazine’s co-founder and spirited suffragette Belle Case La Follette—and probably Yoko Ono—would agree on that.

Remembering Midge

2009-04-18T09:12:00.001-07:00

I was so saddened to open this morning's paper and find out Midge Miller had passed away. She was an inspirational feminist and civic activist who changed the world with her true grit, smarts and sincere honesty. I am going to miss having her on the planet.

Here's an article I wrote about a woman's place in Wisconsin ... Midge's place.
A Woman's Place is in Wisconsin

By Brennan Nardi

Go back to 1856 and tell the stories of not just the men but the women who built this city into what it is today and Madison: The Formative Years author David Mollenhoff would have another hefty tome on his hands. To do the women of Madison and their contributions justice, you really need a Ph.D., a book deal, and permanent residence at the state historical society. I possess none of the above, but I did once ponder a Ph.D. - in women's history, no less. That is, in fact, what drew me to Madison.

It started back in 1989 at the University of Virginia, where a fledgling women's studies program was offering a freshman course called "The History of Feminism in America." It would be my subversive ticket out of plain-old history and into a world where the lives of Jane Adams, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan leapt off the pages of a different academic canon, and landed inside my psyche.

Along my merry undergraduate way, I discovered a political activist and historian named Gerda Lerner from the University of Wisconsin--Madison. Not only did she teach history, she had made history as a young Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust in 1938, chronicled in her 2002 autobiography Fireweed. Lerner's work turned up on more than one course syllabus during my college career (she pioneered women's history as its own academic discipline). Then, in my senior year, I took a class called "Women's Health in America." When I saw that the textbook was written by UW professor Judith Leavitt, I took it as a sign. My grandmother's family had "summered" in Wisconsin since that late 1800s. Having spent glorious vacations in the Northwoods as a girl, I was eager to find a way to extend my time there as a grownup. Grad school in Madison seemed like a respectable option.

I chose journalism over women's history, and never did meet Professor Emeritus Lerner, though I did solicit her for a campaign donation or two during my brief career in Madison politics. Instead of following Dr. Lerner into Bascom's Ivory Tower, I shadowed the women who were making history right before my eager eyes. It was on former State Rep. Midge Miller's porch -- where my mentor, political activist Jeanne DeRose, had wisely taken me one sunny afternoon -- that I fell in love with Wisconsin's progressive tradition, passed down to me by someone who had lived it and fought to keep it alive for nearly half a century.

Inspired by the Madisonians who came before them -- names like Belle Case LaFollette, Ruth Doyle and Carrie Lee Nelson -- women like Midge Miller, Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson, NOW co-founder Kathryn Clarenbach, Native American leader Ada Deer, and many, many others carried the torch of female leadership during the upper decades of the 20th century. While many are still hard at work today, that generation of leaders has begun to pass its legacy on to the women of Madison who are making history into the 21st century. Women like Madison's first female mayor: Sue Bauman; Fire chief: Debra Amesqua; UW System president: Katherine Lyall; County Executive: Kathleen Falk; Elected Lieutenant Governor: Barbara Lawton; conservationist Tia Nelson (daughter of Gaylord) and U.S. Representative: Tammy Baldwin.

It's the last name on that impressive (and not at all comprehensive) list that might resonate most for the next generation of women leaders in this city. A product of Madison public schools, and of Madison politics from the city council to the county board, the state assembly to the U.S. Congress, Tammy Baldwin has intelligently and gracefully broken through gender and diversity barriers all of her life. And she's only forty-four.

This fall, my daughter will start kindergarten. She will grow up not only witnessing but learning in school the accomplishments of Tammy Baldwin and the scores of influential women who have made Madison the kind of rich and varied community the Belle LaFollettes, Midge Millers and Ada Deers intended. The women's history of the next 150 years will be nothing less than … history itself. And it won't take a Ph.D. to find it.

Brennan Nardi is the first female editor of Madison Magazine, which was founded in 1978.

Hearing the Whispers

2009-04-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember when I first read Jason Stein’s byline, but I do remember thinking to myself that this guy had a future in writing. I knew his name from the UW–Madison journalism school where we’d both studied. He was a real talent and everybody knew it. Since 2003, Jason’s been a full-time reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.

Last June, he wrote a series on Native American languages in Wisconsin called “Down to a Whisper.” It was an emotionally charged, beautifully crafted story about the vanishing languages of the tribes—what had happened to them and how, maybe, some of them could be saved, or at least preserved, in a way that future generations could appreciate and understand their heritage. It was published in print, and the online version was presented into a nicely crafted new media format with audio, slideshows, maps and graphics.

Jason’s piece was so good it recently won a national honor—the Freedom Forum/American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity—and two Milwaukee Press Club awards.

I asked Jason about why and how he decided to take on such a complex and multifaceted story—without much time off from his regular state government beat.

“It sort of germinated for a while,” he says. “It was just a little thing that led me to write the story.” And then he launches into the “little thing,” which like most big things has deeper roots once you start digging around in your mind for the seeds. Jason lived in Strasbourg, France, for a year, where residents speak a regional language called Alsatian, but like Native languages here it’s not being passed on to future generations as readily as it once was. He also spent time in a Mayan village in Guatemala. “Some of the languages have hundreds of thousands of speakers but I still noticed them weakening,” he says.

While he was in grad school at UW, he read about a professor’s language preservation work with the Menominee tribe, which piqued his curiosity. This was about five years before he would actually sit down to write the story.

“I reached out to a couple tribes and tried to break through and I really didn’t,” Jason explains. “For years I tried to reach out to people. I finally broke through and got to the right people. It’s not easy coming in from the outside to do the kind of story that I wanted to do.”

Before he started the research and reporting in earnest, Jason had a feeling he might not find evidence that any of the five languages had much chance for survival. Years of federal government assimilation practices and benign neglect by tribal elders who believed their children and grandchildren might be better off without it had taken their toll. But the further he delved, the more confident he became that solutions were out there, they just wouldn’t be easy. And in some cases, the spoken word might be preserved but not entirely restored or with total authenticity.

I asked Jason how the tribes, particularly the educators and advocates for the cause, reacted. “It was really gratifying. I was prepared for it not to be,” he says. “For you to spend your life working on preserving these languages, you have to really have a believe that you can accomplish that goal. And yet a real finding of the series was that the situation was dire. I was prepared for people to feel uncomfortable with that. But they weren’t.”

I’m always fascinated with the ritual of writing. For some the words spill onto the page like beer from a tap, and the writer returns to them only to revise, polish and send off to the editor. But for many more of us the words need coaxing before they trickle out like erratic drips from a leaky faucet. Writer’s block is real and menacing. I love Jason’s leads, so I asked him how he approached them.

“It comes very slowly and painfully for me,” he says. “On day one I went back and forth on a couple different leads. Up until the end that was one thing that I was prepared for people to object to because [the lead] comes out and states pretty explicitly that these languages are dying and that isn’t really their view of it.”

But the consummate journalist has only one master: “I felt an obligation to present things as a mainstream reader would see them,” he says.

At the same time, Jason took a measured and diligent approach to the story—it took about a year to write and produce for the web—that feels deeply respectful of the state’s Native American culture and experience.

“We ended up using a lot of historical photos. We did slide shows and a lot of them told stories that crossed over decades. Because of the nature of this particular story, I was very concerned about not having something perceived as just being taken and not adequately credited.”

While Jason says he’s skeptical about how much a newspaper story can affect the political process, he’s proud of the fact that his has had some impact. Gov. Doyle’s budget bill includes $250,000 a year for competitive grants tribes and school districts can apply for as part of a broader strategy on native language preservation that Jason details in his story.

Of course the funding is controversial in a recession, and Jason’s been reporting on the proposal’s fate from his desk at the state Capitol. Stay tuned.

Don't Know Much About History

2009-03-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

I minored in history in college, so I got pretty geeked up when we decided to write about local history in the May issue of Madison Magazine. The last time we tackled the topic in earnest was to mark the sesquicentennial back in 2006. This time around we’re returning to the city’s roots with the help of some remarkable historians and archival experts.

We started our journey back in time by meeting with the good folks at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Jammed into a dated and dusty conference room, a half-dozen history geeks shared ideas and inspiration for how we might frame the article. The conversation was so stimulating we weren’t quite sure what to do with it all. Editorial director Neil Heinen came away geeked up about the idea of history in the digital age and how the Internet has made it more accessible than ever. We both began to think about the instructive if not eerie connections between the past and the present given the unprecedented economic downturn the world is experiencing.

Then next step was a fascinating follow-up conversation with WHS archival historian Jim Draeger, co-author of Fill’er up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations. I’d worked with Jim a few years back on a terrific Mad Mag article featuring Frank Lloyd Wright protégés so I was confident his mega-brain would help set the story in motion. After we peppered him with dozens of questions on historic corollaries to modern-day issues and he responded with enlightening answers, it occurred to me that we had a really nice story in the making.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through all the research and halfway through the writing, and I’m happily spent. The folks at WHS continue to amaze me, and books like David Mollenhoff’s Madison: A History of the Formative Years and Stuart Levitan’s Madison: The Illustrated Sesquicentennial History Vol. 1 are life savers. Mollenhoff offers a sweeping journey through the social, economic and political history of our city, while Levitan places particular emphasis on biographical portraits of influential people and the politics and turning points that have shaped the city’s growth and development. Both are remarkable in their intellectual depth and accessible prose.

These two books, the WHS website and local historian Ann Waidelich have helped me make sense of the past; UW–Madison professors Patrick Remington and Ann Smart Marin, along with an encouraging associate editor and art history major Katie Vaughn, are helping me draw comparisons and conclusions about the present. What fun! I hope readers are just as geeked.

Good News

2009-03-09T11:45:00.001-07:00

For the second year in a row, Madison Magazine has been chosen as a finalist in a prestigious national city and regional magazine awards competition. Five magazines from around the country are vying for the top spot in the General Excellence category. There are three tiers based on circulation; our magazine is in the 30,000 and under group. We're a small market compared to, say, Chicago, New York and L.A, but our competitors are not lightweights. And neither are we! There's some spectacular magazine editorial and design work happening across the country, and we are grateful to be named among the best. Click here for the details. They'll announce the winner in early May. No matter what happens, making the cut is an accomplishment, and I'm proud of the staff and those who've supported us in our efforts.

Violence UnSilenced

2009-02-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

I'm ripping this headline from the headlines, since the blog by the same name has become an instant success. You might think success is a weird, even insensitive word to use for an online forum where victims and survivors of domestic violence share their stories.

But it's true. The blog is three days old and already averaging a thousand hits a day. Its founder, Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz, is one of my writers, and she began her journey (well, her public one anyway) to give voice to a silent epidemic in an article published in Madison Magazine in 2007. Then last year she worked with Domestic Abuse Intervention Services to find women who’d be willing to tell their stories publicly, which among other things threatens their safety. Last November we published her amazing article on seven local survivors.

Maggie didn’t stop there. She worked all winter to launch Violence Unsilenced, and for all you Internet smarties who know how to measure success in the blogosphere, this is the reaction to the site after 24 hours.

2,250 hits on violenceunsilenced.com
1,329 hits on okayfinedammit (where comments were closed)
106 comments
126 emails (not including the 44 between the designer and I)
51 mentions of the words 'violenceunsilenced' on Twitter -- (a fun illustration of this is to go to www.summize.com and type in 'violenceunsilenced' and also 'maggiedammit')
10 direct messages on twitter (a secondary email, like facebook emails)
22 new twitter followers
9 Facebook messages
an instant Technorati rank of 7 right out of the gates (wicked good)
a request for an interview on blog talk radio next week
a request for a Q&A on some blog I can't think of the name of right now
a guy actually made a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wnxaSs4wZY
the editor of BlogNosh magazine requested a badge to put in rotation on her (megapopular) site for free
32 new survivor stories sitting in my inbox ready to publish
countless numbers of Diggs, Stumbles, and Google Reader shares (no way for me to track this)
#2 spot on Kirtsy.com for the day

Maggie has been writing a very popular blog from her home in rural southern Wisconsin for a few years, so her social networking universe is huge and paying off. Widely read blogs like Alltop and BlogNosh are noticing, but more importantly the word is spreading in an innovative way to reach a whole new audience of people who are touched by this, or who simply care.

Maggie knows viscerally how this kind of success turns your stomach when you think about it. It’s such a sad and frightening thing. But at the same time it’s beautiful and powerful, like the “Take Back the Night” marches designed in part to return the power abusers have deliberately taken away. And to begin the healing. And this writer/blogger Maggie who is not a social justice advocate but a journalist is using the power of words and now, the Internet, to try to heal deep wounds but even more importantly to prevent the first act of violence from ever happening. Take Back the Night 2.0.

You know when somebody like Sully, the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson, shies away from the word "hero" because through his lens he was just trying to help? That's Maggie. She's just trying to help. And so far she's had some terrific success.

Absolut Improv

2009-02-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

Writer, humorist and corporate trainer Jodi Cohen is at it again. She’s teaching improv workshops this winter and spring and lemme tell you they are special. A couple workshops ago Jodi asked friends to stop by the last class to serve as audience for her students’ to practice their technique. A half-dozen of us showed up like groupies outside a concert tour bus. I was so excited to see Jodi in action that it never occurred to me she would be busy instructing rather than performing that evening. No matter. Watching her teach was almost as much fun.

Her nurturing calm and pragmatic, reasonable approach to teaching stood out. The folks taking this class weren’t budding Saturday Night Live comedians (though did you know Jodi worked with Chris Farley during his Madison days?); they were ordinary people—some shy, some funny, some dramatic—who were taking the class to fulfill a variety of personal needs and goals. Watching the moment take over their nervousness and inhibitions was inspiring. They had all come there simply to learn new skills and in the process they had become an improv troupe for one night. My little girl was so entertained she didn’t want to leave. Of course, she was smitten with Jodi, having recently seen her fabulous one-woman holiday show “Oy to the World.”

When Jodi sent a call out for classes this spring, I actually considered taking one myself. Coming out of my shell has been a lifelong project and I think Jodi’s class would help shed more of my turtle-like habits. Alas, I had conflicts (both real and internal, I’m sure)… but maybe you don’t?

Says Jodi, “The improv for writers is really quite wonderful. I’m teaching it differently than I have before. You don’t have to leave your chair. At all. It’s using some of the basic improv principles in writing practice. Lots of room for one’s imagination to blossom.”

Hm. Maybe I should reconsider.

Jodi also tells me she’s excited about her improv for adults class. “It’s a great group,” she says. “One man crawled around on the floor in pretty much every scene. I’ve labeled him ‘the crawler’ in my subtext.

“We did this one exercise where we give each other imaginary presents. The person ‘receiving’ the present gets to say what it is. One young man in the class who is tres adorable said, for some reason people kept giving me dead animals. We were hysterical, as it was always his own imagination at work.”

If you're a writer in need of an imagination kick-start (and let's be honest, who isn't?), get thee to Jodi's class! There's one this weekend called "Eight Ways to Create a Character." Take it in the afternoon, then dazzle your partner with more than one romantic you...

Stayin' Alive

2009-01-30T17:57:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting at my kitchen table trying to get my slow-as-molasses-in-the-summertime computer connection to click through to the 29 comments on the second-to-last blog entry to Judith Strasser’s “In Lieu of Speech.”

While I wait impatiently I open her latest book, “Facing Fear: Cancer and Politics, Courage and Hope,” to the first chapter. I should’ve read it the day it came out in 2008 but instead it sat on my desk as the days’ and weeks’ mail slowly buried it beneath ten and twelve and sixteen other books by local authors I should be reading and blogging about.

The comments I'm waiting to read are in response to the post titled “Changing Voices” (which is a brilliant title) written by her sister, Susie, who signed on to let us know Judith was “declining fast.” Susie has encouraged her community of friends, fans and colleagues to write, as Judy is still "definitely interested" in hearing what people have to say.

God I want to know what people are commenting about. How do you even BEGIN to respond to such a beautiful and sad and heartfelt blog post?

I don’t even know this woman and I’m touched by the mark she made on humanity.

She raised the money to build the Children’s Museum that my daughter treasures. She is a domestic violence survivor and now that the comments have finally popped up I know she was an inspiration to the DV community. She has a loving family and a rich spiritual life. She wrote a book while she was being treated with stomach cancer.

I recognize a few of the godspeed-wishers. Harriet. Dean B. Ronnie. I’m not surprised these writer-intellectuals crossed paths with Judith Strasser, who passed away three days after the blog post.

Isn’t it funny how all of a sudden, now that she’s dead, I’m curious to know everything about a woman I’ve never known?

“Everything happens for a reason,” a brain tumor survivor was once quoted as saying in Madison Magazine. “You just have to figure out what it is.”

I found this poem on Judith Strasser's website and for some reason it feels like the perfect way to remember a I person I will never have the pleasure of knowing.

How to Stay Alive
by Judith Strasser
Trash your cigarettes. Shun restaurants and bars
that traffic in second-hand smoke. Eat organic
and low on the food chain. Steam vegetables;
don't grill meat. Just say "no" to marijuana, Jack
Daniels, and cocaine. Stay home: do not rent cars
at Miami's airport, or ride the New York subways,
or dig potshards in the Negev after massacres
in Hebron. Don't drive vans older than you are
to places you've never been. Always buckle your
seat belt. Have someone else strip the asbestos
from your furnace and heating pipes. Test for radon
in the basement, lead in the drinking water, cracks
in the microwave shield. Avoid electric blankets.
Use condoms, or don't have sex. Walk to work.
Remember your sunblock. Don't go jogging after dark.
Keep off the neighbors' grass after they've sprayed
the yard. Wear a helmet when you bike. Take
a buddy to the lake. Don't lie about your weight
to the man who adjusts your skis. Lower stress
with yoga; divorce your husband if you must. Cross
your fingers, say "Star Bright" to Venus, avoid
black cats, spit three times over your shoulder
on your thirteenth annual visit to the oncologist.

Originally published in Prairie Schooner, Winter 1995
Books

Big Hugs

2009-01-23T09:28:00.001-08:00

Check out Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's blog on journalism. When elected officials respect, appreciate and understand the role of the media, you just want to hug 'em. Last year on Neil Heinen's Sunday news show, For the Record, I opined that Mayor Dave was a great city manager but a political animal he was not. Among the many issues I was reacting to were his quietly confident style—as opposed to some of his more outspoken and dramatic predecessors—as well as a few high-profile dust-ups, like the Meadowood Neighborhood meeting where residents took aim at him for not putting public safety first.

Soon after the mayor dropped his campaign for light rail and redoubled his efforts on crime and other grassroots problems the city faced. I've heard plenty of folks say he's actually an extremely skilled politician who simply gets the job done differently. I'm starting to see what they mean. Maybe now it's time those neighbors whose concerns Mayor Dave took to heart step up again, this time to help him fight for a greener, more affordable and cost-effective transit system, including streetcars, to get them where they need to go.

Writing a New Day

2009-01-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

It’s kind of daunting to be an editorial writer today. So I took the easy way out and solicited my contributing writers to paint a portrait of “right now” from Madison, Wisconsin. I asked them to tell me what was on their minds on the eve of the inauguration of our first Black president, Barack Obama, during such tumultuous times. As I read each entry, what slowly emerges from the dialogue is a collective sigh of relief. That’s no surprise. Eight years after we were encouraged to go shopping as a solution to terrorism, we are suddenly being asked to participate in our future. Change we can believe in? I sure hope so.

First, let’s hear from the baby boomers:

“Two months ago, for the first time in my life, I walked past a young African American child and thought, 'She might be president some day.' Imagine during the rioting of the late 1960s if someone said, 'Hey, there’s an African American child six years old living in Hawaii, conceived out of wedlock, who will be president of the United States in forty years.' All good things are possible." –Denis Collins

“My memory takes me back to Lakewood School in Maple Bluff, January 20, 1961, where we watched John F. Kennedy sworn in on a black and white TV set. I was in seventh grade and one of very few Democrats watching at that place on that day. I have never had as much enthusiasm for a presidential candidate since that day. I actually was a paid employee of the McGovern campaign in 1972 and it soured me on Presidential politics. Until this past year. I remember watching Barack Obama’s keynote speech four years ago and realizing this was someone who was on fire. I supported his bid for President from the very start, but admit I had little hope he would win. That was until the Iowa caucuses. Tomorrow, I will be watching his inauguration with that same sense of awe and admiration that I did back in 1961." –Dan Curd

“It’s been said the first responsibility of any American politician is to 'get right with Lincoln.' By his character, temperament and intellect, Barack Obama has done more to get right with Lincoln than any politician ever. His combination of emotional maturity, intellectual curiosity and political openness augers well for the republic.” –Stu Levitan

“I have never thought of Barak Obama as a man of color. For a lot of people that is the most significant change. That is true but is not what is most important or impressive to me. … My earliest awareness and impression of Barak Obama was of a very bright, very articulate person. The night he spoke at the Democratic Convention during the Clinton administration, I was blown away with his speaking ability. I believe he thinks about topics thoroughly, gathers advice from a variety of sources, and is able to reach decisions by weighting the information in a balanced manner. In addition, his ability to be articulate means he is able to communicate those decisions in a way that we (the public) can understand. For me, I don't care a bit about the color of his skin but about that attitude and ability.

“I am most excited about the comparisons Lincoln and FDR. This is a terrible time in our history, two wars, an economic crisis, and yet, I am full of hope, great hope. I think President Obama has to be honest with us, that it is not going to be easy to recover from these challenges and, at the same time, speak to the 'better angels' that Lincoln referred to and 'nothing to fear but fear itself' that FDR spoke of. He has to get all of us behind our ability to get through this difficult time and to move forward in positive ways. Make the America that we as Americans think we have, or thought we had, or think we messed up the promise of. This time is the closes to that promise in my adult life." –Nancy Lynch

"I am struck by this nation’s barbarities of her past and the brave hopes of her future. As a toddler, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Chicago, I watched the sunset in the west, the beauty of the orange and red hues, all colors playing in harmony. Then, forsaking the moon and the stars, riotous flames danced on the horizon as the city burned. In my life I have seen legalized segregation and the fact that, because of their skin, people could not vote. Now a black man is President. That transformation symbolizes hope for me." –Kent Palmer

“Hooray, we finally chose intelligence over ‘one of us’ and inspiration over lies. The challenge is great. Consumption as a percent of our GDP will drop. What will fill its place? We must envision a new business model for our economy, not just stimulus to get us back to the old economy. The former could usher in a wonderful future. The latter will be a disaster.” –Kay Plantes

It’s interesting that as I separate these thoughts by generation I notice how the lens starts to change. While baby boomers are hopeful and resolute, Gen X-ers are anxious, ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

“I’d love to be eloquent, witty or even cheeky, but really I’m just a jumble of nerves, excitement, hope, relief and pride. I’m also a little nostalgic. I lived in D.C. when Clinton was inaugurated (the second time), and I’d love to be back in my apartment on Connecticut Avenue this week, bars on the windows and hold-ups in my basement and all. And I lived in a good neighborhood!" –Jennifer Garrett

"For me, the idea of Obama transcends policy and procedure. Does that make me a dreamer? Probably, but I’m not apologizing for it. We can argue politics and practice until we’re blue in our faces, but that’s the thing—Obama makes me want to. I haven’t felt that way in my entire adult life. This is a first." –Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz

"I hope he doesn’t get shot. What I mean is, I love this guy and I am worried that we are not post-racial in this country." –Robert Gutsche, Jr.

"Obama has (wisely) not been shy about stating the challenges we face. But for Inauguration Day, I am going to try to push those worries somewhere toward the back of my head, so I can appreciate and marvel at everything this historic event means to our country and to the rest of the world. After a couple months of nothing but bad news, I am more than ready to revel in a little hope." –Jenny Price

“When I saw the crowds at the McCain rallies, I thought of America as she used to be.
When I saw the crowds at the Obama rallies, I recognized the America that is.
For anyone who still thinks diversity is a trend, the train has left the station. We’ve leapfrogged our prior consciousness of what we are as a country.
Buckle up." –Rebecca Ryan

"As our new president takes to the stage, we have finally reached a long overdue milestone that, despite the challenges ahead, has helped renew the spirit of a nation. Partisan politics and pundits aside, I hope we all can continue to ride this wave of inspiration and meet community, nationwide and global challenges head on." –Laura Salinger

Contributing writer Mary Erpenbach just called me to say she was sorry she didn't send anything. She's headed to watch the festivities with her son, Ted. We talked about her granddaughter Lucia, who's just over a year old, and about what a difference this all makes to the next generation. And the best part? They'll never think twice about it.

And this just in—fashionably late—from Mad Mag's back-page columnist and boomer:

"After so many years, it feels good to know that the Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution, are now true.: –John Roach

Food in the City

2009-01-15T15:19:00.000-08:00

Food is a bit of a rock star these days, loved and loathed just like celebrities.

In a recession, food—especially healthy food—is a luxury to a lot more people. Folks are having a hard time finding enough of it for their families. Thankfully, we have a strong food bank and distribution system in our community, so we find and feed as many hungry stomachs as possible.

How we grow and produce our food is another lively topic of conversation. I’m a big fan of anything Michael Pollan writes, outlining in excruciating detail how the failures of the modern agricultural system is one of the most important subjects on earth. The guy is brilliant (and coming to Madison later this year) and if he and others are successful in convincing the Obama family to plant a garden at the White House, the Sashas and Malias of the world might not grow up (like I did) wondering how hard they have to scrub to remove the chemicals on their apples and carrots.

Here in Madison, local and organic food conversations are lively and abundant. We have them in the magazine every month, thanks to senior food writer Nancy Christy and her hungry husband, Neil. Each time I edit their column, “Genuine Articles,” I’m smarter, and more interested than ever in the food chain. They bring us insightful and intelligent food for thought from all over the planet, including people and ideas in our own back yard.

Dan Curd’s blog is another great source of information and inspiration for me. He’s an encyclopedia of knowledge about local restaurants, the state’s culinary contributions, and more. Nancy Lynch’s recipe columns beautifully connect what’s cooking in the kitchen to the warmth of family and friends—she shows how food and nostalgia go hand in hand.

I’m excited to read Terese Allen’s latest book that updates the late Harva Hachten’s amazing Flavors of Wisconsin, a history of food and cooking in the state. It’s due out later this year. Meanwhile, there’s a really great book out right this minute called Hungry for Wisconsin: A Tasty Guide for Travelers (Itchy Cat Press, $25). It’s by Madison’s own Mary Bergin, a syndicated travel columnist whose byline has appeared in The Capital Times for many years. When I picked it up I flipped right to the Madison section eager to see what she’d chosen to feature. There were a few usual suspects—the Farmers' Market and L’Etoile, for example—because they are always worthy of mention. But I was surprised by the diversity of food Bergin finds and loved the way she presented it. So I asked her for an interview and she graciously accepted.

It’s interesting that you open your chapter on the Madison area with its exciting relationships with Chicago restaurants. What was your reasoning? We are not an island. Others notice our good work, good taste and find it attractive. The ever-growing connections between southwest Wisconsin farmers and Chicago restaurateurs add credibility to the product abundance and quality that we locals might otherwise take for granted.

The Madison businesses you chose to profile are a nice cross-section of the food community—from upscale to ethnic to heritage to taverns to, of course, the Farmers’ Market. And the mixture of storytelling and service stands out to me. How did you determine who and what to include? My aim, throughout the book, was to gather the most eclectic mix of food businesses and stories/situations that I could find. It was important to go beyond the obvious.

By the way, you stole my big idea for a picture of Keith Daniels of the Harmony Bar standing next to his bumper sticker door. I’ve been dying to get that shot in the magazine! Keith is a gem, and genuine. I very much like what he stands for. He seems to care about his neighborhood as much as he wants to operate a successful business that bucks stereotypes. “Bar food” can have a “gourmet flair.”

Anybody you regret leaving out? Yes! We had more material than we could accommodate, even though much is written pretty concisely.

I make a point of mentioning that “Hungry” is not a “best of” book. It’s a discriminating glimpse at our wealth of diversity and integrity, as it pertains to food. I continue to hear about enticing enterprises, be it Alpha Delights—a nifty European bakery in DePere, or a farm near Stockholm whose public “pizza nights” during the growing season involve all-local ingredients.

How long did the book take to research? To write? I began my syndicated “Roads Traveled” column in 2002, but my interest in food writing predates that. Some of what I wrote years ago was recycled for this book project. Other material was written just for it. I signed a book contract with Itchy Cat Press in October 2007 and had the project finished (that means even the index – ugh!) shortly before summer 2008 arrived.

What, if anything, was news to you? The depth of our culinary creativity and integrity in Wisconsin’s small towns is amazing. I knew a few of these players when my research began, but I keep hearing about more and more!

What kind of reaction are you getting? It’s been extremely positive, and I’m grateful.

What’s next? I continue to build a full-time freelance writing and photography business, seeking projects instead of traditional employment. Wisconsin people/places/topics are the core of my work, but I’m also traveling far away. Will be in Egypt, for example, in early February.

A Holiday Must-See, Laugh

2008-12-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

If you’ve never met Jodi Cohen, too bad for you. And even though she’ll be presenting “Oy to the World! Comic Relief for the Holidays” right here in Madison this week, you won’t get to meet her even if you just want an autograph. Why? Because she will be busy impersonating a warm and hilarious cast of characters to an audience of folks eager to find joy AND laughter this holiday season. Cohen’s writing and comedy/improv work is coastal caliber, but like a lot of us she fell in love with Madison and the Midwest. So lucky us.

Jodi, who has worked with the likes of Chris Farley and Brian Stack, a writer for Conan O’Brien (read an earlier blog on this), is not only gifted and talented, she’s warm and generous with her time. I know this because I asked her to ask one of my favorite characters a few questions for my blog and she was kind enough to let Helvi give us a preview of the kind of funny you’ll experience when you go to the show. Click here for the schedule.

So, without further ado, heeeeeeeeere’s Helvi!

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Helvi. Well, I’m a social and political macaroni sculptor, making macaroni sculptures to express my feelings about what is going on in the world and to make changes in the world. I used to use clay, but well, that was not for me. I found my inner macaroni and now I have a cable show, “Helvi’s Corner,” and I’m the hostess of the radio show “Pasta and YOU,” where we talk about changing the world one noodle at a time, and I also am the editor of the Macaroni Monthly.

So what were you doing last Friday while the rest of us were skipping, um I mean SNOWED IN, from work? When it snowed I was outside, I was making a snow angel. Then I decorated it with uncooked macaroni. It was itchy, as I laid down in the snow and the uncooked macaroni. But that is what I do for art.

I understand you have some important political statements you’re planning to make in this year’s show. Without giving it all away, could you give us a hint of what you’re going to try to accomplish? Fer cryin’ out loud. I did such a great job canvassing in Wisconsin during the primary that I was awarded the Canvasser of the Year award and invited to the inauguration. Ya’ hey. I’m going to wear my special apron. I’m going to connect with other social and political craftspeople. We’re going to meet in a corner somewhere.

Do you work with a number of different macaroni styles or do you stick with the quintessential elbow? I work mostly with elbow macaroni, but that is just me. You can work with anything that floats your boat. Some people work with clay! Not this pony. No. I tried it, but it lost some of its zip zap sop along the way. I did start working with Spaghetti-O’s as an homage to Obama. However, I feel a little cramped when there’s sauce involved.

Do macaroni ingredients—say, egg or no egg—make a difference in your work? Some people like eggless pasta. It doesn’t hold together in the same way when you get to the decoupage part of the project. But still, whatever works. You have to do your work, make your art, in order to be heard and seen and known in the world. With enough super glue you can do anything.

Is there a friendly competition among the characters you present in “Oy to the World,” or are you all, like, best friends? Everyone who shows up for “Oy to the World” is amazing. I have to say, it’s an honor to be there. People are so nice and friendly and what have you. I give away potato salad recipes as rewards to people who are speaking out. You have to speak out whenever and wherever possible. That is what I always say.

Are there any other artists who work with macaroni—or other artistic media—that you admire or are inspired by? I love Twyla Tharp. I’ve asked her if she’d like to collaborate and I’ve yet to hear back. I’m also inspired by Babs Gillespie, my friend from years ago. She works with laundry in these fanciful ways. It’s hard to explain. I haven’t seen her or her laundry for years and I miss her terribly. One time she wore just a sheet all night because everything she owned was in the wash. She is a consummate artist gal.

What is your New Year’s resolution for 2009? To be realistic about my resolutions. To start small and keep it all very small. One noodle at a time, is what I always say....

OK, I saved the toughest question for last: What’s your producer/director Jodi REALLY like? Ah, well, she’s, you know, normal. I guess. She’s a bit nervous sometimes and is always saying, “Oh, Helvi, where’s your macaroni sculpture? Where are your noodles? Where are your potato salad recipe cards? Where’s your guitar? Do you know the song you’ll do for the sing-along? Have you written your poem? Do you still want to do some modern dance as a way of interpreting the global financial meltdown that’s occurring?” I just say to her O FER CUTE! Build a bridge and get over yourself already then there now. Real good.

See? I told you she was good. Go see Helvi and the rest of Jodi’s gang this week. You’ll get delicious Imperial Garden Chinese food to boot.

Two Journalists You Should Know

2008-12-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

Back when I was studying for a master's in journalism at UW–Madison, I spent a lot of time on news.wisc.edu, the University Communications website. The depth and breadth of its coverage made it a fertile ground for article ideas and academic experts for my writing assignments.

After I joined the magazine I signed up for their media press releases and often marveled at how thoroughly reported and well written they were. I used to joke about how the newspapers should've just printed the releases verbatim; often they were smarter and more provocative than the stories that showed up in the next day's news.

When uber-talented UW communications staffer Tim Kelley was lured back to the State Journal, I wasn't surprised. He penned a ton of great stories that came out of the press office. Tim also wrote for the magazine for a time. He was one of those freelancers who took an assignment, you wouldn't hear boo from him for a month, and then he'd file a story you hardly had to edit. You never quite felt like you were earning your keep. Tim's still at the State Journal as its digital media manager for madison.com.

Another UW communicator I admire is Michael Penn. He wrote and edited for the UW alumni magazine On Wisconsin for many years and is now with a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences magazine called Grow. Michael is an excellent storyteller, and he has a knack for reporting that a lot of writers think they have but don't. He gets that readers want more than the who, what, where and engages them in an intellectual joyride.

Check out Penn's recent article on corn, called "Grain of Doubt." If you've read The Omnivore's Dilemma, or even if you haven't, it's a local complement to the global discussion about the corn crop and how it is, in detrimental ways, taking over the planet's agricultural system. Remarkable, and a little bit scary.

Diversity Almost Done!

2008-12-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

While I hope readers are busy devouring all things pet in our current issue of Madison Magazine, my staff is a little busy on the next issue. Thing is, it’s not just any issue, it’s two magazines in one. For more than a year now we’ve been planning for a new, 68-page magazine celebrating diversity in the Madison area. It’s called Spectrum Magazine, and the organization we’re producing it for is the Madison Area Diversity Roundtable. They are an amazing group of Madisonians I’ll blog about later, but for now I want to brag about the writers and designers who are, like I said, B-U-S-Y putting this important publication together.

Laura Salinger, who has deftly covered a broad range of issues and topics for The Madison Times, Capital City Hues and Asian Wisconzine, wrote most of the major articles, and a whole slew of smart, talented people, including all of our editors, designers and more than a dozen area freelance writers and photographers, have been laboring to make this magazine matter in a community that embraces diversity but doesn’t always follow through in executing it. (More on that later, too.) For now, just know that I can hardly think straight, much less blog straight, because I’m so nervous and excited about sharing Spectrum with you.

It’s been hard and exhilarating to help birth a new magazine … and remarkably, the labor has been longer than my seven-year-old who took her own sweet time in production. But in a few short weeks Spectrum Magazine will ride along with the January issue of Madison Magazine, which we’re dubbing “Big Ideas.” The Spectrum concept is a perfect fit for a magazine about what our city and its people can accomplish if we set our minds to it. Because we all know that ideas are only as good, or as big, as those of us willing to work to make them happen.

Op-Ed Epiphany

2008-11-24T20:37:00.000-08:00

This is going to sound so corny, but as I read the State Journal’s latest op-ed, “Don’t let pols pick their votes,” I had an epiphany about Wisconsin politics. Last Sunday the thoughtful and paid-to-be opinionated editorial page writers were opining about the state’s rotten redistricting rules designed by and for incumbents to protect their legislative seats. Lefties and conservatives both took the heat for allowing the once-a-decade line drawing to conveniently shed voting districts that aren’t exactly keen on their brand of politics.

As a trained journalist, I can be skeptical about the reckless nature of power and influence. And I can wax all poetic about how crucial it is for democratic societies to examine and question the role of leadership and government. Frankly, that’s why I’ve been so pissed lately that newsrooms have been virtually abandoned by their corporate owners and ungrateful advertisers. (Is it just me or do the ads in the State Journal lately look like invasive species choking healthy flora?). But at the same time, I have always felt that most people in charge—be they teachers, priests, doctors or politicians—have their community’s best interests at heart.

So it’s with a heavy—and a little bit guilty—heart that I share my epiphany. Wisconsin started its journey into the 20th century a progressive and principled role model. It finished out the 1990s a fat and happy cat, the kind that led to political cronies, legislative caucus scandals and now, because all good things must come to an end, five-billion—BILLION—dollar deficits. It’s atrocious. And what I realized reading the op-ed column Sunday was that Wisconsinites like me are so used to good, clean government and a reputation for years and years and years of best behavior by our elected officials that we can't acknowledge or accept how much damage has been done. We’re no longer a role model; we’re the girl you don’t dare bring home to your parents.

Fellow Midwestern states like Iowa—let me repeat: IOWA—have gotten the best of us when it comes to something as straightforward and little “d” democratic as redistricting. Then there’s another neighbor called Minnesota, with sparkling clean lakes and a taxation system that experts say is a friend to businesses, government and education without bleeding taxpayers’ wallets.

For so many years we’ve voted so many good and honest people into office—Democrat, Republican or Ed Thompson—that we’ve taken for granted our privilege and responsibility to hold these humans, with all of their imperfections, accountable. Then we’re shocked and appalled when they pass a Band-Aid solution to funding public education, campaign on the taxpayers’ dime, or hold a budget hostage to protect the special interests and party leadership that got them elected.

We’ve all had our political epiphanies. Mine is admittedly a variation on a pundit’s theme, and frankly, a little too late. While my belated “aha” moment won’t do much for that state of our state, it reminds me of the incredible importance of our editorial voices, whether they are in print, online or over the airwaves. They are made up of smart, well reasoned and well-read professionals who tell us what they think--not because, like our politicians, they want our vote in the districts they’ve drawn like kids with too many crayons, but because they want us to know the facts as they see them.

We might not agree with the op-ed pages every time, but we should respect what they have to say, and in many cases, thank them for having the courage to put pen to dying paper.

First Step

2008-11-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

Our November story on domestic violence (on newsstands now!) has struck a chord. The advocacy community praised it (though I received some understandable flak for not running the crisis hotline number: 251-4445). Survivors identified with it and took the time to let us know. But best of all, we’ve heard an anecdotal story or two about how it helped bring someone the courage to leave an abusive situation.

That’s exactly why we titled the article “Seeing is Believing.” If you see yourself or a loved one in one of those remarkable stories of survival, you might believe in yourself and your situation. You might acknowledge that it’s real, and happening to you, and that you need to get help.

The title was also intended to shed light on one of society's greatest failures because so often domestic violence goes unnoticed or ignored by friends, neighbors, employers and the media. It takes a village to recognize and refuse to allow chronic and dangerous emotional and physical violence. And when we do so, we take the power out of the hands of the abuser. It becomes a community problem—like homelessness, burglary, or jaywalking—that is no longer tolerated just because it goes on behind closed doors. It says to the abuser: what you are doing is wrong, even illegal. So stop, get help, or go to jail.

The subject has so deeply affected the author of the article, Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz, that she is building an online community of support for a new blog called Violence UnSilenced. Here’s Maggie’s latest update on her own terrific blog, which is spawning her new advocacy campaign.

When the domestic violence blog goes live, I’m going to ask survivors to speak out. And because they are brave enough to speak out, I’m going to ask the rest of us to pledge to listen. I hope you will take up that challenge. Please, keep listening.

A few days after Maggie’s article came out, I ran into my friend Bill at the Harmony Bar. Bill is a writer and a poet, a gadfly and a grandpa … an all-around good guy. Though I respect his politics, we usually disagree. And yet, when we got to talking about domestic violence Bill launched (as Bill is wont to do) into a diatribe about women’s liberation. If women are not free, healthy and educated, Bill told me, economies collapse, democracies fail and societies are ruined. The world needs more women in power, he continued, because they won’t let their sons go off to war without a fight of their own.

While Bill was pontificating I thought of the Taliban in Afghanistan and their oppression of women. I thought about how every nine minutes a woman in the U.S. is beaten. I thought about how women still earn substantially less than men, which is often why they can’t leave an abusive situation. I thought about my mom, who helped get my hometown’s first battered women’s shelter off the ground. How she would make me close my eyes when we drove there because even a little girl might tell the wrong person where it was.

But not everybody understands the fundamental truth about women like Bill does—he and I do agree on that one. Which is why we need more survivors telling their stories to Maggie and more Maggies launching blogs and more moms volunteering at shelters and more Bills spreading the gospel from barstool to barstool. We all have something we can offer the cause.

What can you do?

Well Done

2008-10-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

So it’s an embarrassment of riches when we are lucky enough to have two well stories in a single issue. In the magazine business, the “well” is the place where you run the meaty, in-depth features, which usually includes the cover story. With our little glossy—as opposed to, say, Vanity Fair—the well is often home to only one feature-length story. We try to dedicate as much space as we can to the well because it’s important to let a story breathe, to let the pictures compel the reader to come join in the conversation. And that it will be worth their precious time. In November we had two important stories to tell, so we decided, come hell or high water, to squeeze them both in.

The first is a profile of Madison’s Police Chief Noble Wray, who we named our 2008 Person of the Year. Public safety is on everyone’s minds—tonight’s Halloween festivities, which haven’t always ended well, are a prime example of why. And while Chief Wray has worked hard to make Halloween less drunken, reckless debauchery and more good, clean fun, citizens throughout the city aren’t feeling as safe these days. So we asked award-winning writer Frank Bures to explore the problem through the lens of a quiet and thoughtful Wray, who is policing a city that can no longer afford to see itself as a quaint little college town.

The second well story is a stunning portrait of seven survivors of domestic violence. Writer Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz weaves the stories of isolating fear and remarkable resilience together in a way that somehow gives me hope. That these women were brave enough to tell us what they went through means we can no longer ignore the pain and suffering that goes on behind closed doors. When women and children are abused and subjugated, societies weaken. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan for evidence of the worst possible outcome of inequality and rule by ignorance and force. And even in a place like Madison, violence against women happens everyday but we don’t hear about it unless someone is severely injured or killed.

So if I was lucky to have two well stories in the magazine this month, I hit the jackpot with the writers who penned them. Frank and Maggie are two of my favorite storytellers, so I decided to ask them a few questions about how they do what they do so very well.

Maggie: What was it about the story of domestic violence that made you want to write about it? How prevalent it is (one in four women), and how little press it gets unless someone dies. The whole “murder-suicide” thing bugs me to no end, because it makes these events seem like isolated incidences—well, they're not. They are the inevitable end to a long-standing cycle of abuse within a relationship. I also knew that one third to one half of all Dane County arrests are domestic-violence related, so that made the lack of news coverage even more appalling to me. But it’s not that the media is being irresponsible, it’s far more complicated than that. Because of safety and privacy issues, because of fear and shame, these women are essentially muzzled. But abusers get their power manipulating those very same things—so maybe if we keep dragging the issue kicking and screaming out into the open, some of that power can be reversed. Mostly, it was really important to me to give these survivors a voice, and to show everybody else just how common these stories are.

Frank: You’ve profiled Bishop Morlino, Sen. Russ Feingold, brain researcher Richard Davidson and others for me over the last few years. What was different about Police Chief Noble Wray? One of my favorite writers, Gary Smith, says, “Each person’s life is a problem to be solved.” I think that’s really true. And not only is their life a problem they (and you the writer) are trying to solve, but there’s some larger story around their personal story that gives their story meaning. With Morlino it was the search for absolutes in a shifting world. With Feingold, it was a question of how you make the biggest decision of your life. With [UW–Madison men’s football coach] Bret Bielema it was the personal cost of success. With Davidson it was a question of free will. Noble Wray’s story, how he came from a tough background and rose to the top, is the perfect American story. But the larger narrative around that is about how Madison is changing, evolving, and what part Wray plays in that story. The challenge with writing about him was that he doesn’t much like to talk about himself, which is fine if you’re his neighbor, but not so good if you’re profiling him.

Maggie: You told me you envisioned the way you would write the story before you actually interviewed the seven survivors. How did that evolve as you went through the interview process and then sat down to write? If you’re trying to get me to publicly admit I hear voices in my head, then fine, you win. From the beginning I could hear the women’s voices in a chorus, kind of overlapping. Since I don’t like to go into a story knowing what I’m going to write, I tried to just get out of the way and focus on being a megaphone for them. But as the interviewing process went on, I was really struck by how different each of these women were, but how many of them were saying the exact same core things. One night I dreamed the story in its current format, with the women’s stories connected by identical quotes. So when I sat down to write, the only real outline I did was connecting those quotes in the right order. Then I just let the women speak. You’re welcome, I look totally crazy now.

Frank: I talk to a lot of young writers and journalism students about how in magazine journalism we “show, don’t tell” a story. In your profiles, you often do this by setting some amazing scenes for the reader. Talk a little bit about that process. Yeah, that’s a big difference between magazine and newspaper writing. What I do is sometimes called “narrative nonfiction,” where you’re trying to recreate a scene and transport the reader there. It involves more detailed and imaginative reporting, and I think it’s where my background as a travel writer comes in handy. You want the reader to be able to see and feel and hear the things that were going on, and in a way that contributes to the storyline, not in a way that’s just throwing things in. It’s basically storytelling through pictures and images—you have to visualize it. In the classic anthology, The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe says that with this kind of writing, information isn’t the basic unit of reporting. The scene is. So you have to imagine it, report it, recreate it and interpret it. And this can be hard with profiles, because you’re basically taking someone else’s life and making it your own.

As far as “show don’t tell,” it’s easy to say, hard to do. Basically I avoid adjectives, and try not to write in a way that manipulates someone into feeling/thinking/seeing something. I want them to arrive there themselves.

Maggie: It’s difficult to do these kinds of stories without being personally affected by them. How has this experience affected you? Well, I’m not letting it go. It’s definitely under my skin. I am considering starting a domestic violence blog to keep the conversation going, and I’ll probably keep bugging you for follow-up stories. I am completely humbled by the bravery these seven women showed in trusting me, in allowing me to speak for them— but there are many, many more who don’t have that option at all. Yes, it was emotional and depressing, but more than that it was really inspiring. I’m raising daughters. I feel like it’s my mandate to do my part in solving a social issue this critical. I want everyone else to feel that way, too.

Frank: You have two bylines in the November issue—you also wrote our travel essay and it’s this crazy trip you took from the suburb of Verona to downtown Madison by foot. First, what the hell were you thinking? Second, what are trying to convey to the reader through this kind of travel writing versus the more conventional service-oriented “go, see, do” story?
1.) I have no idea what I was thinking.
2.) One big pet peeve of mine is how everything in our society is preconceived and packaged for sale. This peeve doubles when it comes to travel, because travel is so much about your own experience in a place. And half of that experience—or more than half—is the imagination and insight you bring to it, as well as how you let it change you. So one thing I hoped to do with this piece was to inspire people to create their own experiences rather than just pay to consume someone else’s. There are so many fascinating things in this world, but they’re all on the road less taken. And that road lead me from Verona to Madison. It involved some chafing.

Chafing. I think I’ll leave it at that. Now do you see why I’m a very lucky editor?

Get Thee to the Festival!

2008-10-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

The Wisconsin Book Festival is one of those community events you can take pride in—even if you had absolutely nothing to do with its launch or its success. You read. You buy books. You read some more. Of course you’ve contributed to the cultural milieu that could sustain such an enlightened gathering of authors and book worshippers! I, for one, can’t say the same for the Ironman. Swim, bike and run all you want. Make Madison look like the fittest city in the country—at least for one day—and I’ll be proud as punch. But I can’t lay any sort of claim to that remarkable survival of the fittest.

But if you are a book lover then this is your weekend to flex your literary muscles. If you like books and cooks, you might want to come on down to the Dardanelles on Sunday evening, where two of my favorite writers and foodies will be sharing stories and advice on how to ready a recipe for publication. Since I flirt with my microwave far more than my stove, it’s always amused me that the lovely Joan Peterson (see bio on book fest website), author of the terrific Eat Smart series of culinary travel books, has asked me to keynote the event for the last few years. I’m so grateful, though, because I get the chance to listen to and mingle with smart, fascinating people who experience both the joy and the art of eating in their lives.

My friends Terese Allen and Ronnie Hess are headlining the evening, followed by food sampling and conversation with the who’s who in local food writing and publishing. So come on out and join us at six for the talk and 7:15 for the food.

Hey, Ironman: it’s the ideal spot to load up on carbs!

For a primer on the event, I chatted with Terese Allen, who is busy preparing recipes for Sunday’s event, called The Book and the Cook.

What kind of stimulating conversation and delicious flavors we expect at the Book and the Cook? When people think about translating recipes there’s two ways to look at it: the writing of the recipes for publication and the process you go through. We start with the testing process … and how you might have to convert metric measurements from foreign languages or reduce recipes from a large size to a small size. Or it could be a professional chef’s language translated into everyday cooking language, or a language spoken in history with different terms or ingredients.

Ronnie is going to take a couple recipes and demo them. I’m going to take a recipe from each of four categories—professional, historical, café cook, and a home cook—and illustrate the before-and-after and why things need to be worded differently to be recreated in today’s home kitchen.

How is your latest book project coming along? We’re in the galley stage … It’s called The Flavor of Wisconsin, and it’s a revised and expanded second edition of Harva Hachten’s The Flavor of Wisconsin, which came out in 1981. It’s been a generation and everything’s changed…. The Wisconsin Historical Society Press asked me to fill in the historical dots and talk about what’s happened in Wisconsin culinary history. We’ll have 450 recipes with eight essays that take you through Wisconsin’s food and cooking history, both by chronology and by topic. Most of the recipes were in the first edition. This book was researched throughout the 1970s and during that time Harva and her staff were collecting recipes from Wisconsin kitchens. It’s just this really wonderful collection … they narrowed it down from 900 recipes. My job was to round out what possibly could’ve been missing from that and then to include recipes from New American cuisine and Wisconsin’s role in it, which is much bigger than people realize. I also added two chapters that expand greatly on her chapter on food and business.

*Ed’s Note: Harva Hachten (who wrote articles and columns for Madison Magazine) died suddenly in April 2006. “I wish she could’ve seen it but I’m very happy she knew before she died we were in this process,” says Terese.

Cookbooks and culinary writing seems to thrive here. Why? It absolutely does. Madison being the food town that it is, and also Wisconsin in general being such a literary place with lots of writers—a lot highly concentrated in Madison. I don’t think people understand what an epicenter we are, with the local food movement, the farmers’ market, the university, the seasonal cooking restaurants. We’re drawing from so many different interests around here. So the food and cooking comes together. It’s just a wonderful place to be if you’re interested in both… I’m sitting pretty!

When I started writing about regional food back when I was a chef at Ovens of Brittany in the eighties, I didn’t feel quite legitimate. It’s wonderful to look back now and see what’s happened. And it’s become a national phenomenon.

This Just In: I just got a press release reminding me that “October is pizza month! Although it's almost half way over, pizza is a timeless culinary treat you can savor any day of the week. To celebrate, the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board has put together an assortment of delicious recipes, from a traditional Margherite pizza to an innovative Bananas Foster pizza.”

And you thought ham and pineapple was a little weird...

P.S. Joan Peterson, author of the Eat Smart series of culinary travel guides, will also be appearing at the Madison Food & Wine Show this weekend!

The Beat Goes On

2008-10-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that former Isthmus executive editor Marc Eisen won’t write for me (not yet, anyway), I thought it would be fun to let folks know what he’s been up to since he opted to become a staff cut. When the alt-weekly had to make some tough budget decisions this year, the veteran journalist decided it was time to try something else. Fortunately for all of us, Eisen had no intention to stop writing.

Since leaving Isthmus in August he’s picked up gigs with Milwaukee Magazine and The Progressive, even landing the latter’s November cover story, an interview with Berkeley professor and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author Michael Pollan.

Here’s how Eisen describes his very successful career, which is still very much in the making:

“I spent 30 years at Isthmus over two tours of duty. I also worked at The Capital Times, The West Bend News and The Racine Labor paper, and had a cup of coffee at The Janesville Gazette."

Here’s a bit about his personal life:

“My youngest daughter Hannah is a senior at East High and my oldest daughter Lauren ls a senior at UW-Oshkosh. Both have been instructed to not go into journalism. I'm married to Connie Kinsella, who is an executive with the University Medical Foundation."

Marc’s not the kind of guy that spends too much time contemplating his own navel. He’s too busy reporting and writing about the issues and ideas of the day, which is why I decided to ask him some unconventional questions. You could say I took the easy way out … or you could say that I was smart enough to know I’d be too easily beaten at my own game.

Since I left Isthmus I....have consciously made an effort to be less of an idiot with technology and to go to the Y regularly. There is no connection between the two except that my IPod is really loaded these days.

It never works when....I violate my deeply held belief to always anticipate—and avoid—situations where nothing will work.

The thing about journalism is....that lately I think of it more as an art than a craft.

The thing about journalism....is that the economic model that sustains it is collapsing with amazing speed.

The thing about journalism is….that the cyberspace version is very different from print—and in some ways deficient.

The thing about journalism is….that today people can create a media world—through TV, radio and the Internet—in which they never expose themselves to a single word that challenges their existing beliefs.

Barack Obama and John McCain....are engaged in the most important presidential election in 40 years: The winner will have to deal with the fact that America, after eight years of George W. Bush, is in decline.

I've always wanted to know....how neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists explain the internal monologues that run through our minds. Think of James Joyce's stream of consciousness. Wait, you mean you don't hear those voices?

If I ever wrote a memoir....it would be an act of extreme conceit. My life isn't that remarkable. Now, how I process my daily experiences in that internal monologue is another story. As a writer, I wish I could tap into that never-ending narrative.

How Ya' Doin? (No, This Isn't About Sarah Palin)

2008-10-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

People always ask me, “How’s the magazine doing?” Lately, though, the apologetic tone of the question feels more like somebody’s asking me about my terminally ill uncle than my place of work.

“Better than newspapers,” I tell them, because the magazine business really is OK. In fact, the outlook is very promising. Readership is up, which includes a nice spike in the younger demographic, and with the decline in newsrooms people are hungrier than ever for in-depth stories about the world they live in.

Sure, the advertising has slowed down in a sluggish economy, but by no means has it dried up. Businesses still need to hock their wares, and our magazine has produced great results in all of our core categories, from home, health and travel to dining, retail and entertainment. In a down economy, you want an advertising vehicle you can count on.

You also want content you can trust, which is how our magazine has consistently distinguished itself from the local competition. Sure, good press doesn’t hurt, but if you or your ad agency buys an ad because a magazine says it will write about you if you do, the press you get is tainted, and readers don’t trust it. What we offer instead is editorial integrity, which attracts eyeballs—more than 107,000 sets of them—attached to Madisonians who are invested in their community, and in concepts like buying local, whether it’s a meal, a car, a health care plan, or a kitchen table.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a snippet of media expert James Brady’s conversation on Forbes.com with former chairman of Magazine Publishers of America president Jack Kliger on the topic:

“I don’t know if the magazine business will ever again be as robust,” [Kliger] said. “But ads will still be very important, the dominant revenue. Magazine advertising really works. And consumers like magazines. There’s value to original and trusted third-party content. Young people may not like newspapers anymore, but they like magazines. And we really do have good print journalists and editors who can learn the new digital platforms."

Original and trusted. And doing just fine, thanks.

Local Sleuth Is A Writer, Too

2008-09-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

I hate that saying about how nice guys finish last. I don’t believe it. I just think they have to wait patiently while the mean guys do each other in. Not only is Kevin Hughes one of the nicest guys I’ve never met, he waited forever to find a publisher for his second novel, Casualty Crossing (StoneGarden.net Publishing, $14.95). And then he waited even longer for me to write about it.

A few years back Hughes’ day job as a Dane County Sheriff’s Office detective inspired his night job as a writer of detective novels. Hughes’ characters are so well developed, and his plots so interesting that it’s easy to lose yourself in one of his mysteries. He’s a thoughtful and conscientious guy, and his books reflect not only his passion for his career but his optimistic outlook on life—remarkable given his line of work. You’d think after more than thirty years investigating crimes a person could get a little jaded. His main character Toby Jenkins sure does.

Now Hughes is hard at work on his third book, a sequel to Casualty Crossing, and he says the fourth is slowly materializing in his head.

I talked to Hughes about his books, his job, and while I was at it, I threw him some tough questions about Madison and whether or not it’s a safe place to live anymore. Hughes was decent enough to answer them, proving once again my theory about nice guys.

What did you learn from your first novel, Just Another Shade of Blue, that helped you in crafting Casualty Crossing?

After I had written Just Another Shade of Blue, I enrolled in a writer’s course in which I was paired with a novelist who was also a former staff editor for the New York Times. This one-on-one training afforded me some valuable insight into what makes a novel tick. By using chapters from Blue I was able to see how certain applications can make your characters and plot much more believable. I ended up reworking Blue based on his teachings and was happy with the results.

I applied the techniques to Casualty Crossing from its onset and as a result, the methodology proved to be quite successful. One of the most important things I learned is that a good editor can make a huge difference in your final product.

Your characters have so much depth. They could jump off the page and start walking around. They’re very real. I imagine your ability to get inside people’s heads is what makes you such a good detective. Also, I loved the Madison references—dinner at Paisan’s, the construction of the new Dane County Courthouse, the lakes, politics. Did you have to think about basing the story in Madison with the kind of work you do?

What I do for a living didn’t enter into my decision-making process too much. My trepidation was rewriting the complete novel only to find the change of milieu was a poor choice. Once I worked on a few chapters, it was obvious to me that the story was meant for Madison and not in a fictitious city in Ohio.

The transition allowed me to bring TJ and the other characters alive in a setting that was familiar to me, which fortified the sense of place that plays such an important role in a novel. The added bonus was the opportunity to share my perspective of Madison with the reader.

At times the crime, in particular the brutal rape of the woman, which led to Toby’s courtroom outburst and suspension, felt more real because you situated it in the city in areas I’m very familiar with. It was a bit of a harsh reminder that bad people are out there doing bad things. The spate of recent murders here not withstanding, most of us feel pretty safe.

When I was a kid, I could hardly wait to grow up because I thought life would be so much easier. And back in those same old days, Madison and Dane County were growing up with perhaps the same expectations as a kid. And, we both are still learning that be it a kid or a city, growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

As Madison continues to mature, the challenges of the community increase and one of those challenges is crime. All of us bear the responsibility to keep our cities and towns safe but in the process, we must not fall victim to the fear of crime to a point that it causes us to alter our lifestyle in a drastic fashion.

Wherever you are, no matter what time of day, you must be aware of your environment and digest what is occurring in your vicinity. I’ve lived by a rule that has saved me more times than embarrassed me, which is to follow my gut instinct. The rule should apply to everyone: if you think something is amiss, you are more than likely correct and you should act accordingly. Don’t live with the regret that you could have helped mitigate a terrible incident if you’d only made a call or written down a license number.

Madison is facing issues that have impacted other medium-sized cities, some of which are dealing with the issues quite well and others that have fallen into the abyss of hopelessness. It is expensive to run a city, village, township or a county. Residents must decide where their tax dollars are spent and inform their elected officials. Our representatives are charged with moving their constituents’ agenda forward. But in order for our politicians to act on our behalf, we all must make an effort to inform them of our priorities so they can make the correct decisions regarding public policy.

Regarding the unsolved crimes in Madison, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Madison is fortunate to have such a competent, talented and professional police force. I know that the police are putting forth a great effort to solve pending cases and are committed to locating and charging the person or persons involved for their actions.

Do you share some of main character TJ’s frustrations with the court system, about how sometimes the very same rules that can save an innocent person can also free a criminal? Justice isn’t always served.

Okay, TJ is a fictional character so he’s on his own on this one. As for me, I hold Dane County and Western Federal District juries in high esteem. I have learned that when those twelve to sixteen jurors sit in that box, they are attentive, intuitive and most of the time render what I believe is the correct verdict based on the facts of the case and information that the court allows them to consider.

What do you love most about writing? I love the creativity of fiction, which is my forte for now. When I’m in the writing phase of a project, oftentimes the characters will highjack the plot and, although this might sound a little odd, I let it happen because I become curious as to where they will end up, which can be quite different than my original concept.

I was amazed by your level of detail. You describe every scene right down to the pattern on the couch. I imagine that’s the kind of trait good detectives must have in order to solve crimes.

My writing technique is somewhat based on the reports I’ve prepared regarding investigations during my career in law enforcement. Prosecutors are very fond of the minutia of a case and I strive to include as much detail as possible to convey the situation as well as the perspective of the victim, witnesses and suspects. Based on that experience, I believe an author should never fake the details of a procedure. Doing so demonstrates lack of respect toward the reader.

Some of the scenes involving Billy’s abuse at the hands of his stepfather are pretty graphic. They were hard to read. What was it like writing them, or had you seen it all before combing through police reports so it was easier to write?

In spite of my experience with abuse victims, I still had difficulty writing the abuse scenes. I honestly thought I had toned down the brutality, but I also knew I had to convey the message of the hell-on-earth lifestyle that so many children must endure. Among the investigations I’ve worked, abuse cases have been some of the toughest and most rewarding of my career. There were not always happy endings, but I always felt that if my actions changed the course of a child’s life I had made an impact on the world.

How do you emotionally detach yourself from the tragic side of your work?

I spent nearly two hours trying to answer this question when I finally realized it could all be summed up in one succinct paragraph: What works for me is to understand that I do not work in the real world. The real world has much more good than evil or we’d really be in trouble.

Who are your favorite fictional detectives?

My all-time favorite was Lenny Briscoe of the old Law & Order shows (I loved his attitude and cheap suits); Harry Bosch, the protagonist in the series by Michael Connelly; Matthew Scudder, the police detective turned private eye in the Lawrence Block series and the list would not be complete without Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue—I’ve never met a cop who didn’t love his character.

Are you a patron of the Madison bookstore Booked for Murder?

Uh-oh, not really. I sent an e-mail and dropped off a sell sheet asking them to carry CC, but I don’t think it happened. I’ve been thinking that I might just drop of a copy for the owner and see if reading it will prompt her to stock some copies in her store.

What made you decide on a sequel to Casualty Crossing as opposed to a whole new plot, and can you give us a sneak peek at what Toby will be up to?

Primarily because I think the characters work so well that the reader will want to keep in touch with their endeavors. And of course, I enjoy the cast and have a lot of fun hanging out with them whenever I’m in the writing or development mode.

Hmmm ... a sneak peek at [third novel] Dogging Truth ... well, I can’t give too much away because it’s somewhat based on Casualty Crossing, but here’s a clue or two: This story is based on a murder in Madison in which a deputy sheriff is the defendant. TJ’s ex-wife, Elizabeth, just can’t leave well enough alone and conjures a way for the two of them to work together on the case, which leads to a very interesting journey that involves the cast of Casualty Crossing. Dogging Truth is set to be released on May 19 and around the first of the year, I’ll share a few more details with everyone on my website. In the works is Archer, the third in the series that will be published in 2010 ... can’t offer a clue on that one because a lot of it is still in my head, which means that all bets are off on where it will end up once the characters take over the keyboard.

When Memory Fades

2008-09-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing what you find out about a person after they’re dead.
My grandmother, Elizabeth Sullivan Nardi, died two weeks ago at age 91. I read in her obituary that after she graduated from high school she worked at the Grit Newspaper in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I had no idea anyone on my dad’s side of the family had any sort of a career in journalism. I didn’t have time to ask my grandfather what she did at the paper. I assume it was some sort of administrative work, but even still, it was fun to know that she and I had shared that kind of experience in our lives.

Nanny, as we nine grandkids called her, was my godmother and I her namesake—Elizabeth is my first name. She and my grandfather, Francis Anthony Nardi, moved into their small but brand-new brick bungalow in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946, raised seven kids there, and until this summer when my grandmother suffered a stroke and moved to a nursing home, lived the respectable, small-town, middle-class life together. They were married for an unbelievable 67 years. Their house on 310 New York Avenue was just a few blocks from my junior high and high school, and so I spent lots of lunch hours and weekdays after school hanging out with Nanny and Pop-Pop. They were wonderful to my two older sisters and me—always proud of whatever we were up to and happy to have us around.

A few years ago, Nanny’s diabetes began to take its toll on her body, while dementia set in to play tricks on her mind. She had finally quit smoking on her 83rd birthday, and we all got a kick out of how she swore it was the reason she started feeling so cruddy after all those years of relatively good health. Thankfully, my aunt and several uncles were around to take care of Nan as her health declined. Pop is very healthy for 92 years old, but his knee aches a lot and, hell, it’s hard enough taking care of your own self at that age. I’ve often thought of how remarkable it is that they were able to stay in their home, and our family is grateful for the love and sacrifice their kids made to see to it that they were together for as long as possible.

When I saw Nanny for the final time last November, she was confined to a walker and spent most of her days nodding off in a recliner. As always, Pop wasn’t more than a holler away, poking around on the computer he’d discovered with joy a few years back. She was mostly blind and deaf, and we talked loudly and repeated ourselves for the hour or so we spent with her. She remembered who I was, though, and marveled at how far we’d driven to visit. We probably told her about the 1,000-mile trip from Wisconsin to Virginia four or five times that afternoon—she was always amazed by each rendition.

After I got back from the funeral last week, I was cleaning out some files and stumbled on a children’s book by a local author, Jeannie L. Johnson. It’s called Do You Have A Moon At Your House? and it’s the tale of a young girl named Madison, who is bewildered by her grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. The title is the question Grandma poses to Madison in the final passage of the book, after they share a lovely moment looking through a telescope one evening. “I felt it was a perfect story to help children learn about this painful disease that takes their loved ones away in degrees,” writes Johnson in the postscript, who also reveals that the book is based on the true story of her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. Johnson’s nephew, Lukas Gaffey, complements her very nice writing with lovely illustrations that capture the heart of the story. It’s a warm tribute to Johnson’s mother, and I’ll keep it around in case I have any friends or family who might benefit from the story’s intent.

As I read Johnson’s book I thought of my own grandmother’s memory loss over the last few years. It really bugged her, and she was harder on herself than I thought she would be when she couldn’t conjure up a name or finish a thought. I suppose … Nanny was no dummy. She knew what was happening to her and she didn’t like it one bit.

I’m pretty sure my grandmother’s stint at the Grit Newspaper was one of the last jobs she ever held. She was your typical 1950s housewife, busy raising six sons and a daughter like society expected. My uncles told some great stories at the funeral. My favorite is the one about how she’d pump up the boys before a big game. My dad and his brothers were short and skinny, so the pep talks had to be good. “It’s not about the dog in the fight,” she’d tell them. “It’s about the fight in the dog.” That’s pretty much how my grandmother lived her final days. I know they weren’t easy but she lived them with dignity and surrounded by love. Nanny was a tough broad, with lots of grit. I’m gonna miss her.

Editing at the Crossroads

2008-08-29T13:16:00.000-07:00

Back in 2003 when Patrick Strickler, then-UW communications director on Bascom Hill, contacted Madison Magazine about Chancellor John Wiley’s interest in penning an article on the state of higher education, editor Brian Howell and I were excited. The legislature was gridlocking, tuition costs were rising and faculty pay was falling. And yet the university held so much promise in so many multifaceted ways. We believed our readers would want to know how the head of the University of Wisconsin–Madison felt about it all.

Wiley’s article ran in the November issue, and for us it was a prelude to the magazine’s new Madison Business section we debuted the following March. The new business content would feature in-depth stories about UW spinoff companies that might someday cure killer diseases, as well as up-and-coming professors-cum-CEOs drawing venture capital to Madison so they could transfer their ideas into the marketplace. Our vision was to tell the story of the Wisconsin Idea in the 21st century, to provide a forum for the sifting and winnowing dialogue the university was famous for, and to connect those conversations to the larger economic fabric of the community and the quality of life we cherish here. It was a bold vision, but Brian only operated in big-ideas mode, and I was more than ready to share the responsibility for making it happen.

When we published the 2003 article, “Higher Education at the Crossroads,” we hoped the Chancellor’s “wake-up call” on funding for public education, and his opinions about UW’s enormous influence on our local and state’s “ailing economy” might raise a few eyebrows, even stimulate some much-needed debate on the subject. We were wrong. Even Wiley, in the first draft of the follow-up column he published in the magazine this month, called the original effort “largely unsuccessful.” He did, though, defend his premise that higher education was at a crossroads, which is why he said he felt compelled to try again five years later. This time, he told readers, the situation has evolved “From Crossroads to Crisis.” This time, his voice has been heard.

Brian, who died of lung cancer in November 2003, would have loved the recent buzz after last Thursday’s posting of the article online, which included wire stories on CNNMoney.com and Forbes.com. Ironically, the cogent, well-written and remarkably candid article earned statewide and national attention and praise in part because the business lobby group he chastises, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, quickly issued a press release to “Wisconsin editors” challenging Wiley’s assertions. It wasn’t exactly the kind of damage control I was expecting, but I guess that’s why I’m in journalism and not politics.

I have to thank our sister media enterprise WISC-TV, which reach further out into the southern Wisconsin region than Madison Magazine does, for breaking the story for us the evening before the magazine came out. Political reporter Jessica Arp conducted a compelling interview with Chancellor Wiley (search for "Wiley" to see interview highlights) and Marc Lovicott’s strong reporting led to some revealing information about the storm that’s brewing inside the closely guarded doors of the WMC. The story headlined another sister entity Channel3000.com, and it's huge viewership helped deliver record traffic to the story on our website. Both Madison newspapers printed stories and editorials, which contributed richly to the dialogue, and Journal Sentinel reporters sniffed out some conflicting statements made by the WMC.

For my part, it was extremely rewarding to edit both of the articles Wiley published in the magazine. The Chancellor is a strong writer who is always open to suggestions for ways to tighten his writing, sharpen the focus and clarify his points. There’s nothing I love more about my job than to work with a writer to make every word count. “Our politics has become a poisonous swill” is my favorite passage in the piece—once again proving the pen to be mightier than the sword. Of course, Professor Wiley’s academic side came out when I removed his footnotes in favor of the journalistic use of attributions, but thanks to the Internet we were able to hyperlink his references in the online version of the story. I think he was relieved.

Whether or not you agree with Wiley—and I made it clear in a testy phone call from the WMC that a column of opinion was not an editorial endorsement—the immediate and for the most part praiseworthy reaction to the article (I was told he received a standing ovation at this week’s downtown Rotary meeting) is an important signal to citizens, politicians and business leaders that we are indeed in a crisis and solutions need to come next.

Fall Essential

2008-08-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

I stopped liking baseball in the third grade, when I came off right field with a shiner from a fly ball my glove forgot to catch. I’m not a Wisconsin native or a baseball fan, either, which is why I’m surprised at how much fun I’ve been having watching everybody cheer wildly for the Brewers this season. And now that I’ve read Tom Haudricourt’s book, Brewers Essential: Everything You Need To Know To Be A Real Fan, I can hold a semi-intelligent conversation on a barstool. With so much human drama in the dugout, on the field and behind the scenes, I can see why it was dubbed America’s favorite pastime. That’s not to say there’s never a dull moment—baseball will always have a hard time keeping my attention—but now that I’m a “real fan” I’ll pay more attention to the notable ones.

Brewers Essential is packed with more than a half-century of highlights and lowlights, club facts and trivia, intimate conversations and memorable moments among players and management—the kind of stuff only a talented and trusted reporter like Haudricourt could capture. If you’re a true-blue Brewers fan, the book is a wonderful trip down memory lane, from the early years as the Milwaukee Braves, to the dark days in the sixties when baseball was dead in the city, to the thrilling moment when Bud Selig brought the Seattle Pilots to the Midwest and the Milwaukee Brewers were born. Haudricourt of course spends some time on the famous/infamous 1982 season, the only World Series run the team ever had. It’s where you really get a feel for what the game was like before free agents and monster salaries take over.

From start to finish, the book is written with such authority and compassion for the team that even the lean years—which apparently was most of them—were fun to read about. After all, it led us to now, where the Brewers are back in contention for the pennant.

Between the Brewers' busy August schedule, Tom kindly answered a few questions about the language of baseball, 2008 season highlights and more from the team’s newest fan.

The book is such a great mixture of your play-by-play storytelling style, which is so much fun, and recollections from all the greats. Can you explain how you gathered the material? A lot of the material I pulled out of past stories from the old Sentinel and Journal, then the Journal Sentinel (after the merger in 1995). A lot of those stories were written by me, which shows how long I’ve been around. I then went around and interviewed many of the players and club officials involved, and asked them to tell me stories I might not have heard before. I wanted to provide insight from their viewpoint, including conversations and occurrences that might not have been publicly documented. Basically, I wanted to give the readers an “inside” look at memorable moments in Brewers history that might tell them things they hadn’t heard previously.

I love all the nicknames in baseball—Harvey’s Wallbangers, Bambi’s Bombers, Stormin’ Gorman, The Kid—Are they a product of a bygone era? Baseball writers talk all the time about the nicknames going away, and how unfortunate that is. Perhaps it’s our fault. Perhaps we should give more players nicknames, whether they want them or not. But a lot of the color has gone from the game, as it has become more of a business. Maybe the players don’t want nicknames because they’ll get razzed by teammates. Who knows? That, along with men wearing hats, are two things I’d like to bring back to the game.

I noticed you didn’t interview pitcher Teddy Higuera, who broke some impressive club records in the eighties. How come? Teddy's difficult to get hold of, and to be honest with you, his English is not good enough to come over that well in a book. He does OK, and he tries, but it’s still limited. Thus, I thought it would be better to talk to others about him. Former catcher Bill Schroeder gave me some real insights on Higuera.

As I was reading the book, it dawned on me that there are no coaches in baseball, only managers. Can you help a newbie out on this one? Well, there are coaches. Each manager has a staff of coaches. There are pitching coaches, hitting coaches, third base coaches, first base coaches, bullpen coaches. But the ringleader is the manager. Just the way the game was developed. The manager in essence is the equivalent of “head coaches” in other sports.

The sports world is all about numbers and statistics, but I was astonished at how often one record or another was being broken. It feels like a bigger deal in baseball … is it? I think records are more revered in baseball because there are more of them, with such legendary names as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Cy Young associated with them. That’s why there was such a big stink about the so-called “Steroids Era” and the offensive records that were shattered during that time in baseball. Many purists believe those records shouldn’t count, that they are tainted. But because we’ll never know exactly who was cheating and who wasn’t, it’s virtually impossible to place asterisks by all records during that time.

I was a summer intern at the Journal Sentinel in 1999. I had just finished a day shift when the crane collapsed at Miller Park. Later that night, I logged onto the newspaper’s website for an update and couldn’t believe how many stories–good, solid, well-reported stories—had been filed. I had so much respect for the hard work and dedication that newspaper reporters and editors devote to the craft day in and day out. Where were you when “Big Blue” went down? I had just returned from the All-Star Game in Boston. That was such a tremendous experience, with the appearance of Ted Williams and all that. Then to come back and see the horror of the crane collapse. Ironically, I had done a story on Big Blue a few weeks prior to the collapse as part of a series I did on the building of Miller Park. That story was used as reference by our other reporters that day and I believe was put back on our website so readers could see what that crane was all about. It is days such as that, whether the subject matter be horrifying or uplifting, that show what newspaper staffs are made of. The next day, I followed commissioner Bud Selig to the opening of Safeco Field in Seattle. I’ve never seen a man with such mixed emotions. He was so happy for the people of Seattle, but so sad and heartbroken about what had happened at Miller Park, especially the loss of life.

A few weeks after the accident, I covered the hard-hat game with the families of the ironworkers who lost their lives in the accident as well as all the construction workers. It was amazing to me the sense of pride these people had in that project. Did you find the same thing? Those ironworkers were immensely proud of that project, and deservedly so. They were building a landmark for the city. After the accident and deaths of their co-workers, they became even more determined to see the project through and build a memorial, if you will, to those who died. I thought it was great the way the Brewers honored those ironworkers, including wearing patches on their uniforms for the remainder of the ’99 season.

Has the book—or the one you published last year called Where Have You Gone, ’82 Brewers?—gotten a bump in publicity or sales with the kind of season the Brewers are having? It’s always beneficial when a team plays well when you’re writing a book about its history. Originally, Brewers Essential was supposed to be published in the spring of 2007. But the Brewers didn’t play that well in ’06 and the publisher, Triumph Books, decided to delay publication for a year. The Brewers fought for the division title right down to the wire in ’07 and I added a chapter about that season. The book then came out this year with hopes higher for the team than in many years, which turned out to be a nice bit of timing.

You’re a great sportswriter. I got the biggest kick out of your creative turns of phrase. A “gimpy-kneed Gorman Thomas” is my personal favorite. Another fun one is in the chapter, “The Big Tease,” which is about the team’s almost-comeback 2007 season. On Prince Fielder’s inside-the-park home run against the Twins, you write: “He did a few chopsteps at the bag and emptied his gas tank.” Where do you come up with this stuff?! Baseball, and sports in general, provides the leeway for using descriptive phrases you might not be able to use in pure news stories. And every night there seems to be something different to write about. I try to be as descriptive as possible so that the reader can picture in his mind what I’m writing about. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a few well-crafted words can paint a pretty vivid picture.

If you were writing the next chapter of your book on the ’08 season right now, what would be one highlight? If I were writing a chapter on the 2008 season right now, one of the highlights would be the four-game sweep of St. Louis on the road just after the all-star break that was part of a 7-0 trip. Two late home runs by Bill Hall and another by Ryan Braun snatched victories away from the Cardinals in dramatic fashion. Had those games been in the post-season, folks would have talked about them for years.

The situation is obviously completely different, but I still couldn’t help thinking about Favre and the Packers’ fallout when I read about Paul Molitor’s rocky departure from the Brewers. What’s your take on it—and on Favre if you care to comment? I heard a lot of comparisons to Paul Molitor’s departure when the Brett Favre saga was playing out. One of the main differences was that the Brewers were stripping down their payroll at the time and jettisoning a lot of players. Many Packer fans consider the team a Super Bowl contender with Favre, which raises the stakes. Plus, a quarterback is so much more high profile than any baseball player is. I think the story of Favre’s departure will have much longer legs than the exodus of Molitor.

Diving Into Diversity

2008-08-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

I'm late to post! What a week. For the last few months I've been working on another magazine. It's called Spectrum: Celebrating Diversity in the Madison Area, and we'll publish it in January, along with the regular issue of Madison Magazine. We'll also overprint 70,000 of them for you to pick up at key spots around the city and region. Finally, the businesses sponsoring the publication will integrate it into their recruitment and retainment portfolios.

Initiated by an up-and-coming business collaboration called the Madison Area Diversity Roundtable, the magazine is the first of its kind in the community. Not only will it highlight the broad diversity we enjoy here in Madison, it will shine a more inclusive light on how we live, work and play together. All of us. Black and white. Young and old. Gay and straight. Walking and wheelchair-bound. Academics like Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?) and business consultants like Madison’s own Rebecca Ryan (Live First, Work Second) are showing us how and why it's to our economical advantage to place a high priority on diverse communities and workplaces. Now it's our turn to show what it could look like.

I'm excited that former Cap Times web editor Shauna Rhone has signed on to write and edit a large portion of it. Her resume is impressive, and she understands and appreciates Spectrum’s goals. Shauna and I have gotten to know each other over the last year or so as part of another cool project, Race & Media Forums. Coordinated by The Center for Democracy in Action, the program brings together members of the media with people and institutions of color for social and professional conversation and networking. We'll feature the forums in Spectrum, along with a lot of other exciting and innovative ways Madison is embracing diversity.

Lately Madison has also embraced the Brewers with a fervor I’ve never experienced in my fourteen years living in Wisconsin. That’s why I’m spending the weekend reading the recently released book, Brewers Essential: Everything You Need To Know To Be A Real Fan, by Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I need to play some serious catch up on the team and its history, plus I’m going to interview Tom for my next blog. This Virginia girl has her work cut out for her to earn her "real fan" stripes.

Achy, Breaky Hearts

2008-07-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

Madison Magazine contributing writer Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz blogged for a year, retired last month, then pulled a Favre last night and posted a blog at the behest of somebody named Amanda, who told her a web-zine named BlogNosh was featuring some of her oldies but goodies. I'm glad she's back honing her craft because she's one of the most gifted writers I've ever worked with and if we're lucky she's got, like, a hundred more years of journalism ahead of her.

I told Mags that while I'm delighted she's blogging again, I take issue with her lumping magazines in with the following comment:

"I keep reading about the death of newspapers, of magazines, of my field, the drying up, the washing out. My gut tells me there is something to this online community, this forum, that maybe my future lies not in the traditional journalism, but in a hybrid of sorts."

Magazines and magazine readership are fine, dammit!--and especially with younger readers: Madison Magazine boasts more people in the 18-34 age demographic than ever. Take that, all you advertisers flocking to the web!

Unfortunately, some of the same can't be said for newspapers, though the recent Editor & Publisher report that readership hasn't declined much at all since 2006 was a bright spot in an otherwise dark and dismal landscape. So bright that I blogged on about it two entries back.

But if you're like me and rooting for newspapers—and the journalists they're shedding like a dog's fur come fall—you'll appreciate this effort by the Columbia Journalism Review to capture the voices of the veteran reporters who've been downsized. Imagine how difficult it must be for those affected to see their lives, their livelihoods, and their loyalties change in an instant.

I forwarded the posts to some of my colleagues who've taken The Cap Times buyout or who've left their newspaper jobs of their own accord after seeing the writing on the newsroom wall. I hope they'll contribute. I'll keep checking the CJR posts—they're running one a day right now—in the hopes that I'll see a familiar byline. Madison's chapter in this ever-evolving book has gained national attention and our struggles need to continue to be told.

If I were writing a chapter in the story the nut graph would go something like this: Amid the age of Internet, wonderful, talented writers who happen to also be trained professionals are being asked to stop covering the news of our communities and our world. If they won't, who will? That's my biggest fear. Who will be fair and balanced? Who will accurately, ethically and with integrity report the news? Who will want to major in journalism and populate the news outlets left standing after all this said and done? Where's my next Maggie?

Fortunately, she's out there. I put an ad for writers on Craigslist and since have been inundated with strong resumes and interesting, well-written clips. (Mostly.) But that's only one leg of the stool that supports and sustains the good publications that will still have these talented folks. Citizen-consumers have to purchase and subscribe, and businesses have to advertise. And if a newspaper isn't the news, weather and information vehicle that we want to invest in anymore—though I hope it's not—then we have to choose something else.

I agree with Maggie that journalism's future will be a "hybrid of sorts." I'm just not smart enough to figure out what that will be. Whatever we end up with, we need those people that have little to do at the moment except pour their hearts out to CJR. I have faith, though. Journalists became journalists because they are curious, adventurous and enterprising. Look at The Politico. A couple of guys (and a very rich businessman) voluntarily left The Washington Post to start the Washington-centric website that, according to Wikipedia, "is rumored to get 14 million hits a day."

Oh, and it publishes a NEWSPAPER three days a week when Congress is in session, too. How novel. A newspaper.

Oh, the Irony

2008-07-22T08:32:00.001-07:00

You have to slog through my last blog to appreciate the news that Editor & Publisher is upping its digital ante. They haven't given up on their print edition (yet), but they'll publish a duplicate electronic version for "multiple distribution channels." Though still subscriber-only, the new format will allow readers more access points, like cell phones and search engines. Sounds like more betting on the come and probably a smart move for an old codger like E&P, which began publishing in 1884. That's NOT a typo.

Here's the Press Release:

Editor&Publisher magazine to offer its first Electronic Edition via a partnership with Pressmart Media

New York, N.Y.; July 14th, 2008 -
Editor & Publisher magazine (www.editorandpublisher.com) today signed an agreement with Pressmart Media Ltd. (www.pressmart.net) to provide a digital, same-as-print electronic edition of the newspaper publishing industry’s leading trade publication.

In a joint statement E&P Publisher Chas McKeown said “the Pressmart state-of-the-art solution will provide our readership access to Editor & Publisher on multiple digital distribution channels including eEditions; Podcasts; Mobile devices and eArchives.”

“We are very excited by E&P’s choice of Pressmart as their new media delivery partner. E&P had a choice of vendors and chose Pressmart’s best-of-breed solution,” commented Myles M. Fuchs, President of Pressmart Media Ltd.

About Editor&Publisher
Editor & Publisher is the authoritative journal covering all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.

Based in New York City, the magazine dates back to 1884, when The Journalist, a weekly, was founded. E&P was launched in 1901 and merged with The Journalist in 1907. E&P later acquired Newspaperdom, a trade journal for the newspaper industry that started in 1892. In 1927, E&P merged with another trade paper, The Fourth Estate. In January 2004, E&P switched from weekly to monthly publication, while revamping its Web site to offer more breaking news and content on a daily basis.

E&P Online (www.editorandpublisher.com) offers breaking news free to all visitors in our Top Stories section. Each week, selected proprietary stories from E&P staff are made available free to all visitors, but the majority of our analysis, industry news, features, columns, and trends are restricted to E&P subscribers.

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Media Contacts:
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What's Black and White and STILL Read All Over?

2008-07-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

Almost three months ago, I grabbed my last edition of The Capital Times out of the company mailbox before heading home for the day. About the same time, I switched my laptop's homepage from the default to Madison.com/tct, ready to embrace the newspaper’s pioneering foray into cyberspace.

I don’t log on at home as much as I thought I would—the kid, the dogs and summer in Madison all conspire to keep me away from the computer. It seems the evening newspaper ritual I had hoped to continue in cyberspace is instead lost to the hands of time.

I keep up with the Wednesday edition and Thursday’s 77 Square, both of which appear in my driveway once a week tucked inside the Wisconsin State Journal. But I know it’s only a fraction of TCT news, information and opinion I should absorb as a citizen and a journalist. How ironic it feels to be so unplugged, so disconnected from a news source that’s now—in theory at least—so connected to the world over the Internet.

According to a recent poll, I’m not the only newspaper reader whose habits haven’t changed much in the last two years, despite the doom-and-gloom reports that readership is plummeting. This week Editor & Publisher reported that 62 percent of respondents to a Readership Institute poll said they’ve never logged onto their local paper’s website. And like me, only 14 percent said they’ve visited in the last seven to 30 days.

“Readers are more engaged with the print newspaper than newspaper Web site,” the article stated.

But here’s the quote that nearly knocked me off my big, red office chair: “…[R]eading customers aren’t deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are.”

Madison Magazine associate publisher Mike Kornemann, who was with Capital Newspapers (which owns both The Cap Times and the Wisconsin State Journal) for many years, tells me advertisers are too infatuated with the younger demographic into the wild, wild web. Another irony here, as Mike points out, is that since newspapers have always done poorly with the younger demographic, why would they be anymore likely to find Next Gen online when they don't think what newspapers print is relevant to their lives just yet?

Kids don’t start looking for news in any large numbers until they turn into grownups with jobs and families and decide it’s time to put down roots. That’s when trusted, reliable news and information about their communities, their countries and their world starts to register. That’s when they become newspaper consumers.

I’m beginning to think newspapers should stop chasing their tails and start to refocus on the loyal, engaged readers (and consumers: Helloooo, affluent, retiring baby boomers!) they apparently still court. If you like the Readership Institute’s study, readership has only declined an teency-weency bit since the group’s last report in 2006.

Advertisers panic, and all of a sudden it’s a foregone conclusion that technology has won the arm-wrestling match over how we consume our news?

I don’t buy it.

Like to Hike

2008-07-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to keep up with a weekly blog when you take seven days of vacation. I didn’t post last week and I hope I don’t fall down on the job again for a while. Catholic guilt is never far from my conscience.

If you read my last entry, you know I spent time in the northwoods, where the lakes dot the landscape like fresh drops of deep-blue paint. I’ve spent nearly every summer of my life there, yet each time I return I am in awe. As far as the eye can see, evergreens stand tall and stoic around these glacial kettles, resolved to be there for as long as Mother Nature will have them. It’s hard to come back after a respite up north.

Several miles before we reached the cottage on this particular trip, a big black bear came lumbering out of the forest and across the road in front of us. I hadn’t seen one in more than fifteen years. The next day we heard there were more bears—and bear sightings—than in years past. Like my fear of flying, my bear anxiety got the best of me and I only ventured out once to hike my favorite trail on earth. Environmental and science writer—and Madison Magazine contributor—John Morgan included Fallison Lake Nature Trail in his tote-along guidebook 50 Hikes in Wisconsin (The Countryman Press and Backcountry Guides, $17.95), which he co-wrote with his wife, Ellen. John and Ellen compare the trail to a movie set, and describes a lake that “shimmers like black glass.” He’s right on both counts.

Like pocketknives and bug spray, the Morgans book is a nature trek essential. It heightens the adventure, and even gives advice on how not to encounter a bear! Sounds counterintuitive, but making noise while I hike and smelling like sun block and insect repellent are two of his suggestions, both of which I will do from now on.

Winter, spring, summer or fall, Fallison is achingly beautiful. I’ve heard coyotes howling in the spring, seen beavers damming the creek in summer, crushed leaves under my feet in fall, and trekked through new-fallen snow in winter. When I read John’s chapter on this magical place, I felt better gushing about it and bringing new visitors to hike it every chance I get. I’m not crazy—it IS the most majestic places on earth!

Back home, I used 50 Hikes for some trails in and around Madison. In addition to digestible and descriptive prose, John and Ellen did a really nice job with charts, maps, directions, and safety recommendations (like how to keep the bears away!).

A few weeks ago 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles (Menasha Ridge Press, $16.95) showed up in my mailbox. I knew about the Madison-area trail guide by Kevin Revolinski because the publisher had sent my a galley and asked me to write a review for the back cover. Since I’ll probably never have the patience to author a book of my own, I was honored and excited to be asked. I called the book “spectacularly comprehensive, well organized and fun to read.” I was truly impressed, and now, flipping through the actual book a few months later, I’m amazed at the level of detail Revolinski, who lives in Madison, provides for each of the hikes he recommends.

I especially like the way he organizes the hikes. The table of contents lists them by city and county, but a few pages later he also breaks them out by all sorts of measurements: length, best maintained, good for kids or bird-watching, dogs or wheelchairs. The hike descriptions are accurate down to the bat houses, benches, and where the mosquitoes are particularly bad.

If you’re my kind of hiker, you’ll be looking for a place to grab a bite or a cold one after your adventure. Fortunately, Revolinski’s got that covered, too. At the end of each chapter, he recommends “nearby activities.” For Cherokee Marsh just a mile or so from my house, the book recommends taking in a Mallards baseball game while you’re in the neighborhood. I can taste the veggie burger and Mallards Ale already.

The Art of Vacation

2008-06-27T15:31:00.000-07:00

When you’re on vacation, even the mundane daily chores don’t feel quite as taxing. Whoever piles the last piece of laundry on the top of the basket throws a load in the washer. If you hear the dryer buzz you fold the clothes while you catch the tail end of the movie. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches take twice the time—and twice the fun—to assemble, and dishes get done in an assembly line formation. Save for the family member who volunteered to cook that night, everybody pitches in until the last pan is dry and the stove is clean enough for pancakes and eggs the next morning.

In our northwoods cottage, the kitchen is command central. It’s the first room you enter, where the crowds gather and disperse. It’s where you’ll always find a bottle of sun block or bug spray, where you stack the books, magazines and movies you’ll enjoy, and where you make the grocery list (Don’t forget the marshmallows!). On a top shelf next to the pantry is where the cookbooks live. Some come and go with the vacationer—a favorite recipe you didn’t have time to copy before you left home. The rest are donated to the cottage because the recipes inside have summer vacation written all over them.

The first one that found a permanent home up north is appropriately titled, The Nor th woods Cottage Cookbook, by Isthmus food critic Jerry Minnich. Fine writer and friend John Motoviloff reviewed it in Madison Magazine a few years back, and when I saw it at the Wisconsin Historical Museum a short time later, I bought it for our cottage. Imagine my surprise when I turned to the page that dedicated the book to friends of mine on Plum Lake. Turns out many of Minnich’s fondest northwoods memories—and well-worn recipes—were from time spent in Sayner, Wisconsin, my family’s summer home for the last six generations. Now that I know Jerry and I have shared some of the very same breathtaking lake views and calls of the loons, I have to say he’s spot on when he insists that cooking at the cottage be hearty and tasty but shouldn’t turn into a production. Why? Because a northwoods sunset waits for no one, not even the cook.

Another reason the recipes should be short and straightforward is that when you stay at a summer cottage, the person who starts the meal isn’t necessarily the same person who finishes it. This happened just the other day and provides the perfect example.

Husband and brother-in-law bring home a basket full of perch for dinner. Husband cleans and filets them and then excitedly heads back out to the boat muttering something about needing a few more fish to feed the whole family. Since time apparently flies when you’re fishing (always seems to me like it stands still), dinnertime rolls around and husband hasn’t returned with the rest of the day’s catch, not to mention his mother's fish-fry recipe he keeps tucked inside his noggin.

As luck would have it, I’d brought a new cookbook to add to the kitchen shelf called Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe, a delightful collection of childhood stories and recipes by four sisters who grew up in Oshkosh and vacationed in the northwoods. The book was out on the kitchen counter because I was in charge of the potato dish and found a simple recipe for the mashed variety: butter, hot milk, salt, done. By the time I’d changed out of my bathing suit and headed downstairs my sister had already scrubbed and dropped a dozen red potatoes into the pot to boil. I’d finish the dish while she tended to the kids. Meanwhile the bro-in-law steps in to fry the fish with another breezy recipe from Apple Betty for pan-fried trout. Flour, salt, pepper, beaten eggs (his addition), done.

By the time husband comes in off the water (without anything more to fry, I should add), a delicious dinner is on the table and the sun is just setting behind the pine trees across the lake. A toast to Apple Betty and the Sanvidge sisters on a meal well done.

I tried one other recipe during my week’s vacation, this one from another fun new book called Wisconsin Cheese: A Cookbook and Guide to the Cheeses of Wisconsin, by Martin Hintz and Pam Percy. Admittedly, I’m a lousy cook, so I chose an appetizer I knew would be hard to screw up—and one the kids could help with if they weren’t off reading in the hammock or learning to water ski. Cube as many pieces of cheddar, brick, Colby, and Muenster as you like, drown them in beaten eggs, then roll them in breadcrumbs and fry. Turns out French-fried Wisconsin Cheese tastes a lot like a bite-size grilled cheese sandwich—greasy and good. The book is definitely a keeper—there's lots more simple recipes I’m dying to try, like the “Inside Out” Grilled Cheese with Red Onion Jam. Be still (quite literally) my heart.

Whatever I decide to cook up, it’ll have to wait ’til next year. My new cottage cookbooks are resting on the kitchen shelf at the lake—sigh—waiting for my northwoods summer vacation to come around again.

The Media March

2008-06-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

When circulation director (and blogger) Kent Palmer plops the latest issue of Madison Magazine down on my desk one Thursday a month, I’m often so engrossed in the production of the next issue that I hardly even notice. We publish as early as we can so distributors have time to make the switch at newsstands, and to give our advertisers time for their ads to soak into the local consumers’ consciousness. (Our ads sure are pretty—and they get results.)

The July issue dropped onto my desk and into subscribers’ mailboxes June 19. The Best of Madison cover is drop-dead gorgeous. We used what we call a “type attack,” where words instead of pictures visualize the cover story. The typeset is an Arts and Crafts style closely associated with Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architectural footprints are all over Madison and its surroundings.

The man responsible for such an appealing look is art director Tim Burton, who has taken home enough design awards in the last few years that national magazine industry professionals and experts are taking notice (You can’t have him! He’s happy here!). Yet even with a beautiful cover and—if I do say so myself—great content that I’m excited to share with readers, when the magazine went thunk! on my desk yesterday I stopped typing and stared at it wistfully. No. Wait. Stop! There’s eleven more days in June!

I’ve been at the magazine for eight years. That’s damn-near a hundred magazines I’ve helped produce. And while I love each and every one of them like one of my kids (the birthing process is often as painful), I have to admit that June 2008 is my favorite. Despite the daunting economic challenges, our incredibly talented and hardworking sales staff sold enough ad space so that we could spread our wings and take flight as a city magazine.

Like we do every month we covered every topic our readers expect, from politics to food to home, from health to travel to arts and entertainment. We also elbowed enough white space to publish a long-form narrative on the decades-old controversy over primate research at our world-class university. It was the longest and meatiest article I’ve ever edited, and I loved every second of it. As difficult as the topic is to digest—monkeys are dying in our attempts to save human lives—it’s critical that we think about these issues. Madisonians are smart but it doesn’t mean we’re always an enlightened bunch. We need this kind of journalism—and more, not less of it.

That’s why I’m so happy the magazine is spilling out onto the Internet these days, joining our dailies and weeklies in the fight—and it is a scrappy, ugly fight—to keep journalism alive and relevant. Just imagine what it would be like if Isthmus wasn’t watchdogging city government? What if the State Journal lost the strength and the will to take the state legislature to the mat on its excessive use of power? What if The Cap Times could no longer represent the progressive voice our city is both revered and reviled for?

John Roach exercises this privileged freedom of expression in the blogosphere for the first time this week, talking about these very issues and how the digital age might affect us. All I can say is, Watch out, Paul Soglin and Waxing America, our candid, passionate back-page columnist is now wielding his own mighty keyboard and will be waxing the heck out of Madison and beyond. I’m kidding. It’s remarkably important that our former mayor is blogging to the issues. These are heady times.

I know the media will persevere. I’ll get another chance to publish the kind of journalism that drills down into people’s psyches. And since we archive all of our content online I no longer have to worry about losing a story as good as primate research to the march of time.

Likewise, my incredibly talented colleagues will find their footing in the digital age. We’re journalists because we like to challenge authority, to hold people and institutions accountable, and to do it with accuracy, integrity and often, good humor. If we continue to do our jobs and do them well, citizens will continue to value what we do. They’ll keep consuming our products, and the marketplace will follow.

Onward. Or is it … Onlineward.

The New American Girl

2008-06-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

For Christmas in 1979, my parents gave me the best present in the whole world, My Book About Me by Dr. Seuss and Roy McKie. The big, yellow hardback—a veritable tome by my childlike standards—contained the most complete and unabridged encyclopedia of my eight-year-old life.

Page after page of meticulously filled in blanks confessed my love for Oscar Mayer wieners, and reported the number of steps from my door to the first tree. Judging from the sketch of a bird I named “George” on page 45, I was wise not to choose “artist” from the exhaustive list of future occupations a few pages later. There are lots of ways to boost a kids’ self-confidence—sports, drama, praise of a job well done. And for generations Dr. Seuss has been doing his part, too—in my case giving the youngest of three girls permission to explore her surroundings on her own terms.

A few years ago, I was browsing in a Madison bookstore and stumbled upon a copy of My Book About Me. The idea that I could watch my daughter examine the carefree days of her youthful existence in the exact same way I had done thirty years earlier sent shivers of joy up my spine. I snatched up three copies (I was a little overzealous) and hid them away in a closet.

My seven-year-old’s last day of first grade is today, and I’m hoping My Book About Me will be the perfect graduation present. Chloe has finally reached the age of self-examination (I had no idea it happened so soon), drawing contrasts and comparisons to the world around her. She has discovered that when she’s annoyed she rolls her eyes just like her dad, and just like her mom she hates going to bed for fear she’ll miss out on all the action. While I find myself amused by a lot it, some of it’s starting to terrify me. She’s slowly beginning to wonder how others perceive her, like whether Braeden thinks she’s “girl-cute,” or what the school kids will say if they see her underwear while she’s hanging from the monkey bars in a skirt.

The self-examination that will soon develop into self-consciousness is the reason My Book About Me will be but one of several books on my young one’s summer reading list. There’s a new generation of reading material, much of it divided by gender, which builds on Dr. Seuss’s genius. The American Girl series has grown into a wonderful treasury of advice and activity-driven learning that celebrates girls with books that encourage them to “follow your inner star.”

If you don’t hang around little girls much, here’s a brief bio on American Girl. The Middleton-based company is famous for its line of historical dolls with accompanying biographies. They make Barbie and Lil’ Bratz look downright barbaric. Founded in 1986, Madison educator and entrepreneur Pleasant Rowland made a fortune when she sold the operation to Mattel in 1998. (The $205 million her husband Jerry Frautschi earned from the sale of the stock in the company paid for Overture Center).

One of several American Girl titles due out this September is Food & You. It teaches girls the building blocks of good health and nutrition in a fun and engaging way, promoting independent thinking and exploration as opposed to boring information overload. The book uses thought-provoking quizzes, Q&As and easy-to-digest language to tackle everything from the food pyramid to feeling fat.

Because we now know we establish our relationships with food from the day we latch on to breastfeed or take our first bottle, Food & You teaches girls to think about the kind of eaters they are. If you horse down more Happy Meals than dad’s home cooking, you need to make some changes in your eating style. “Whew! You’re a busy girl,” the book declares. “Try to make time for at least one sit-down meal a day.” A “Special Diets” chapter takes a Dear Abby approach to problem solving by dishing out advice on living with food allergies, being a vegetarian or being just plain picky.

I’m thinking the book might come in handy for Chloe and me during the vulnerable times in her life when there’ll be as much “acting out” as “acting in,” where feelings of low self-esteem and negative body image can so easily manifest themselves in eating disorders, from obesity or dieting to—Lord help me—starving herself or binging and purging.

I think Chloe’s really going to like My Book About Me. I hope she’ll spend less time in front of the computer and more time counting the steps from her mailbox to the first store. Meanwhile, I’m on a mission to spoon-feed her American Girl books like Food & You, Dance! (also due out this fall)—even Coconut’s Letter-Writing Kit (maybe encourage her to take up writing like her mom!). We’re already making our way through Just Mom & Me, with fun activities like guessing each other’s favorite things and coupons for spending time together.

I know books alone won’t save her from a lot of the hardships that lie ahead. I just hope they’ll reinforce the words of wisdom she hears a lot from me these days, the same words her grandma said to me: “Head up, shoulders back, and remember who you are.”

Winners & Losers

2008-06-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

I read in next month’s Mad Mag that gardening is “relaxing,” but I bet uber-gardener Karen Johannsen wasn’t busy fighting back a dandelion insurgency when she made the observation. I just came in from the backyard, where I wielded this AMAZING hook-shaped, ax-like tool in last year’s vegetable garden called the Cobrahead. I bought the handy-dandy weed weapon at the magazine’s Green Expo last month, where I can attest to you that I was relaxing.

No, the ten-minute exercise in futility on this dusky Thursday evening, alone in my backyard jungle, was anything but relaxing. It was more like a mass murder. I must’ve ripped up and yanked out the tenacious roots of two-dozen dandelions, easily a foot-high and aiming to take over my garden and my yard like a tumor on the brain.

Relaxing. Right.

Inside, I wash my dirty hands, check on the kid sawing remarkably large logs in her bedroom, and toss my muddy flip-flops in the corner. That’s when I notice my toes—the coiffed, pedicured peds I spent fifty-five dollars on three days ago and hours before the big awards dinner at The Peabody in Memphis. At thirty-seven years old, this was my first indulgence in affairs of the feet.

After the pedicure, I spent a few more hours in seminars, soaking up the web-saturated conversations and resolving to take home the hints, tips, and words of wisdom to justify the expense of a business trip in these heady economic times. Then I threw on my fancy new dress, slipped my swanky red pumps onto my pedicured feet, and marched downstairs to win an award.

We took third—bronze—for general excellence in city-regional magazines with a circulation of 30,000 or less. We took gold for multimedia, a nod to the work we do with sister station WISC-TV and web wonder Channel 3000. Both are stellar honors. Both put Madison Magazine head and shoulders above our peers in the industry, as well as our local competitors, who couldn’t qualify for a prestigious award like this because they aren’t audited or opt not to abide by the basic guidelines of journalistic integrity. That’s another story.

Thanks to the City Regional Magazine Association for judging us worthy. Thanks to my incredible staff of writers, editors and designers. Thanks to Neil, my compass-slash-navigator in this fascinating and complex city. Thanks to my family for being my biggest fans. Most of all, thanks to Madison, Wisconsin for making a Harrisonburg, Virginia girl feel right at home these last fourteen years—without a fancy-dancy pedicure.

Monkeys, Monkeys Everywhere

2008-05-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

So when one of your all-time favorite writers calls you up and says you should give this newbie named Maggie a shot at freelancing, you give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Frank was right. Maggie is amazing, and not just because she works for practically nothing. (I’m seriously going to take her up on her offer to barter with booze if this economy doesn’t let up.) She’s a natural, gifted writer. She is also willing to collaborate, which is harder to do (and to elicit as an editor) than you’d think. So when Neil and I decided the magazine needed to publish a story on primate research, Maggie was our go-to girl. A serious story needed a seriously good writer. Here’s my fancy interview with my friend and freelancer, Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz.

What were you thinking when we were sitting in Neil's office and we pitched you the story a couple months ago? I honestly knew next to nothing about the subject matter, but I was so excited by the assignment. It's every writer's dream to get a "real" story, one with teeth and guts and room to spread out. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never really did. Well, if you don't count the near emotional breakdown I had writing the damn thing.... (laughs)

You knew going in that the debate between animal rights activists and researchers was vitriolic. What surprised you most? Going in, I thought I could follow the formula, you know, interview persons A,B,C, and D on the animal rights side, and then balance them with persons A,B,C, and D on the researchers side -- easy. The problem was, I had a list a mile long of animal rights people begging to talk, and NOBODY wanted to talk to me from the researchers side. I had countless unreturned phone calls and emails, and it bothered me. It was very easy to draw my own conclusions about why they wouldn't talk, to swallow whole what the animal rights side was telling me about them. Once I realized it was a little more complicated than that, their reasons for clamming up became an integral part of the story itself.

How did you approach the story as a reporter? I went to the bookstore, of course! Any excuse to buy a stack of books.... I didn't have to, though, because the animal rights people deluged me with information. It was stunning how well-researched and organized they are. I had brochures, newsletters, videos, DVDs, magazines, journals, you name it. It was overwhelming, and very impressive.

When you sat down to write, what came out first? The beginning and the ending. In order to avoid the boring "he said she said" I knew I wanted to give the first and last word to the monkeys somehow, so I purposely boxed myself in from the start. It gave me more freedom writing the middle, because I didn't have to worry about one side or another having more airtime or leaving the last impression with the reader. I also knew how rare it was to get inside the labs, so that seemed like a good place to dwell.

How are you different now that you've had this experience?
I see monkeys everywhere. I'm totally not lying. I never knew how many pairs of monkey pajamas my kids owned. I also think harder now, and differently, whenever I hear in the news about medical advancements. It's not really a judgment, it's just more awareness about what they are doing and what it all means. I'm also not afraid of word count anymore. Everything sounds manageable. (laughs)

What's been the feedback so far? Everything that's getting through to me has been very positive. If there's negative stuff, I imagine you're keeping it from me, and me and my thin skin are just fine with that, thank you very much. I've had dozens of people pull me aside and ask me what I REALLY think about research on monkeys, and I like that best of all because my ultimate goal was that the reader wouldn't be able to tell my personal feelings by what I had written.

What sort of writer's remorse are you having about the story (I'm not being presumptuous here... I'm your editor, I KNOW you're wishing you'd done something differently!)? In a way I wish it could have been longer, although that's silly because I don't think people would want to read something that long. There are a lot of people I left out of the story, a lot of subplots I didn't have space to introduce. Even what made it in wasn't given enough attention, and I hate thinking anyone might feel underrepresented or worse, that the shape of the story would have changed with more words. I don't know. Everything I've ever written I would probably write differently now. That's why I don't read any of it.

Shameless Editor Question: Would you ever consider a follow-up? Have I ever said no to one of your assignments yet? I'm no dummy.

Bad Transition Question: You shared the New York Times Magazine piece on blogging, "Exposed," with me last week--how much of you and your experience was present in her experience? Not a whole lot, because she's so young. As I was reading I kept thinking "Damn, I am SO GLAD BLOGS DIDN'T EXIST WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND ANGST-RIDDEN." What made it to my bedroom walls, all that bad poetry and the awful sketches of crying girls, that was bad enough. I really feel for kids today whose every move is forever enshrined in cyberspace.

There were parts, though, that hit home. Blogging is a weird thing. In a way it's a real community builder, an interactive forum, a way to practice your craft and find your voice and learn a lot. In another way, it's a powerful tool that's easily abused -- or misused, really. I've learned what not to talk about on my blog, but I've learned it the hard way.

What motivates you to keep your blog going? Fear. Guilt. Obligation. Perfectionism. (laughs) Some days it feels very sophomoric and egotistical to even have a blog at all. Sometimes I feel a little too exposed. It's strange, the more readers I have the less "me" I become on there. At first, when no one was reading, I felt no pressure at all. Now I feel like every post has to be profound and eloquent, and when nine times out of ten it isn't, I feel like a failure. Then again, when I really feel the need to connect with people, this amazingly supportive group is right there at the push of a button. I've made real-life friends from blogging, and I've become addicted to so many other people's blogs. That makes me want to keep going.

Last Question: Will you still write for me when you're rich and famous? I keep forgetting to get rich and famous, I've got to get on that. It's funny, though, I heard writing might not be the best way to do that.... but I also heard you get to use real silverware in first class so I'm forging ahead.

You want to read the story now, don't you? Well, if you're not my family, my contributing writer, or a subscriber (and why aren't you, may I ask?), hop in your hybrid and go find one at any of these fine magazine purveyors. Ready. Set. Go!

If you want to hear me babble more about the June issue, Maggie and monkeys, check out the C3K Live Show (6/08) in my Video Archive.

Lake Take

2008-05-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

Rob Zaleski, former reporter and columnist for The Capital Times, did some of the best environmental reporting I’ve seen in years before he took a company buyout this spring. When I called to tell him Madison Magazine was honoring him with an Editors’ Choice award for his series on Madison lakes and what we need to do to clean them up once and for all, we got to talking…

(Photo credit: Mike DeVries, The Capital Times)

Rob Zaleski: When I wrote [the lake series] I just decided that I was going to cut to the quick. I was going to tell all those that I was interviewing, “Let’s not be diplomatic here. What’s the problem, and what has to be done? Let’s not worry about offending anyone.”

It was amazing to me the number of people I interviewed who were willing to spill their guts out. They all had strong feelings, and I think the fact that people did express strong views really resonated with the public. And I must tell you I was very surprised.

The first story I did I compared Madison to Minneapolis. Roger Bannerman, who’s the stormwater runoff expert in the Midwest– THE guy–he’s the one who first told me about it, that Madison could use Minneapolis as a model even though [the city] didn’t have the agricultural runoff problem in its lakes.

I go up to Minneapolis quite often to visit my youngest daughter. Last summer I probably went there four times and swam laps in their lakes every time. Lake Calhoun, as I noticed in t he article, their biggest lake, has clarity levels of twenty feet right now, which is almost unheard of for an urban lake. That’s why I did that story.

There’s no question there were some local officials in Madison who were angry, who felt that the story suggested that Madison has been complacent in doing anything. And I tried to tell them, “No, I realize steps have been taken but the fact that there were thirty-nine beach closings in Madison last year, what does that tell you?

So that was very encouraging to do those stories and to get that kind of response right at the end of [my tenure at] The Cap Times. It meant a lot. Fortunately, to do a series like that you have to have the support of your editors, and Chris Murphy, the city editor, after we got the response to the first article, just said, “Keep going, keep going.”

I still have four or five people who’ve contacted me in the environmental community who have good followup stories regarding the lakes.

I’m not going to claim that that series is THE thing that’s triggered this reaction to do something about the lakes but I think it helped. It was one of a number of things.

Brennan: What were those other factors? It includes business, and I think [that] component was largely absent in the past, where maybe they paid lip service to it. The business community got involved even though their effort was community driven. The businesses realized that the lakes were their drawing card.

Because of this unified effort, last year they drew 5.5 million visitors to their chain of lakes making it the second-most popular destination in the state behind the Mall of America. It has had a staggering impact on their economy.

If you go to the lakes of Minneapolis, even on a day like today where there isn’t swimming yet, all the beaches will be packed. They’ve got bike and running trails around all the lakes. It’s a gathering place for all different ethnic groups. It’s really something to behold.

Brennan: Maybe our state tourism department should be subsidizing the lakes cleanup here… Madison Community Foundation is working with Clean Wisconsin to come up with a vision. [Dane County Executive] Falk and [Mayor] Cieslewicz happen to be two pro-environment leaders. All the se entities are starting to come together and it’s a matter of coordinating that effort.

Another factor that I think was vital in Minneapolis—they did launch a huge public relations campaign. It’s my understanding—I’d have to check my notes—but there was an advertising agency in the Twin Cities that took on that challenge pro bono, reminding average citizens of the role they play in limiting phosphorus and things like that in getting into the sewers.

Another key component in Minneapolis was they hired a guy whose job was to coordinate the effort and to prevent the inevitable turf wars that break out—different agencies wanting to take credit, different citizen groups wanting to take credit—so that they weren’t fighting each other. He told me that was a full-time job in itself to make sure everyone got a fair amount of credit and that everyone was working together. I see that as the next big step in Dane County, where everyone’s on the same page.

The thing that I found most surprising was that the citizen group was more rigorous and demanding that changes be made than anyone. And the politicians were just kind of swept along. They were surprised that the citizen group finally said, “Enough.” They reached a point in the late 1980s where their lakes were scummy and filled with weeds and people just said enough. I hope the momentum [in Madison] continues in that direction.

Brennan: Give me a brief bio of your career. I’m from Milwaukee, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, Bay View—home of DeMarinis restaurant, the best pizza on the planet, near the South Shore Yacht Club. My dream as a kid was always to be a sportswriter and to cover the Green Bay Packers. Lo and behold I ended up being sports editor of a newspaper called the Green Bay Daily News in the early 1970s at age 25. It was a newspaper started by striking printers at the Press Gazette. I was there for three-and-a-half years and then I went to United Press International in the mid-1970s as a general assignment reporter and night editor. I became sports editor at The Cap Times in 1981. Did that for three years.

Then I had a fascinating but at the same time nightmarish experience. I was hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1984 and had a dream job as sports editor of their new San Fernando Valley section. It was the best job I had in journalism. The LA Times was a remarkable place to work. But when I got out there I realized I could not in good faith raise three girls in Los Angeles.

[Cap Times editor] Dave Zweifel heard I was unhappy. He created a position of columnist and special projects writer, which I began in 1985. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. In the last ten to fifteen years I began to focus on ordinary people who didn’t have a voice. People who were trampled down by the system, or in their daily struggles needed a voice.

I love writing about ordinary people. It reminded me of my youth in a blue-collar, lower-middle-class neighborhood. Those are the people I’m comfortable with and those are the ones who don’t have anyone looking out for them.

Brennan: What happened at TCT? You were asked to reapply for your job? What I’m telling people is that I was very disappointed by what happened. I wish them all the success in the world because some of my best friends are still there. Like Doug Moe, I was disappointed that I had to reapply. Not only that but quite frankly, none of the new jobs that were created had my name on them as far as I was concerned. And so the buyout was fairly generous—I had been there twenty-six years. But as I told them, I’m looking forward to a second career now. I sure as heck am not done reporting and writing in the Madison area.

It’s unfortunate what happened. I wish I could’ve stayed there under the same circumstances but obviously it’s a different operation now. I could’ve reapplied but the five-and-a-half years that I worked for UPI was the only journalism job I really didn’t like and the reason is the motto at UPI is “a deadline every minute.” You’re constantly feeding that beast. I prefer to do in-depth stories. That’s where I think my strength is.

Most anybody who’s worked for the wire services would tell you that the journalism is somewhat reckless. I’m not convinced that the web is the wave of the future for daily newspapers. That’s another two-hour conversation! I think it’s going to play a role but it’s not going to be the wave of the future. They’ve got to find a way to draw more average people to the web.

The people who are reading newspapers on the web are still the eighteen- to thirty-year olds. The majority of those are males and they’re only being selective in what they read. To me, blogs—Mike Ivey at The Capital Times described it we—are just commentary without the facts. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming on forums. Average people are intimidated by that.

I think the long-term future is probably going to come back to TV somehow. But I still think there’s a place for in-depth reporting and it’s probably going to be unfortunately almost all of it in magazines.

One of the first things I did after I left The Cap Times was take out a subscription to the New York Times. Thank God they’re still around and I hope they always are. … Now the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is get my New York Times and go to a coffee shop. I gotta tell you, it’s wonderful.

So what are some other memorable stories that made a difference in someone’s life? I can tell you the craziest reaction was to a column. Sometime in the early 1990s I was looking at the AP wire and saw that South Dakota was bracing for a tourist boom because of the success of Dances With Wolves. It was a slow news day and I wrote a column poking fun at South Dakota, warning tourists that if they’re expecting to see Kevin Costner sitting next to a stream in the Black Hills it’s not going to happen. I was basically saying that South Dakota was a nice state but it was one of the dullest, most "blah" states in the union and it’s shocking to think that tourists were going to be flocking there in large numbers.

Someone in Madison, who was from South Dakota, sent that column to a disc jockey in Rapid City. The way I was told, the disc jockey read it over the air all day on a Saturday. I was flooded with hate mail. It was unbelievable. There was a fifth-grade class in Pierre that spent its whole writing session [on it]. One guy threatened me. We got phone calls from taverns in the middle of the night. How they got my number I have no idea.

It got so bad. I still have the boxes in the basement. I ended up getting over five hundred letters. It went on for over a month. To try and appease all these people—TV stations were calling and interviewing me and wanting to know how I got to be this horrible person—The Cap Times ended up running a full page of hate letters. It was funny at first. But when it continued on and on… it was bizarre.

Out of over five hundred letters I got one applauding the column. It was from some little old lady who lived out in the middle of nowhere who said she was from Wisconsin. She had met a guy from South Dakota, gotten married, and he had dragged her out there. She had been living in hell ever since. She thought I was right on and she actually said that she was writing the letter in her attic and that if her husband knew if she was writing it he would kill her. She signed it Myrtle from Aberdeen.

Brennan: Any others? A series I did about five years ago on how Wisconsin lost its democracy and fell prey to corporate interests, a trend that began with the election of Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1988; a piece I did in 2006 on the devastating effects of coal-tar sealants on the environment, after which the Dane County Board banned the use of such sealants in the county; and a story I did in 1990 on the 25th anniversary of unbeaten Monroe High School's victory in the 1965 state boys basketball tournament—the last year before the tournament was divided into various classes.

As for my most enjoyable interview, it was one I did in 1990 with a man named Pete Tollefson, who several hours earlier had gone on strike and was about to lose his job—after 21 years—as a bus driver for Greyhound. We met over coffee on East Washington Avenue, and he was one of the most charming, decent people I've met—and he was absolutely heartbroken at the thought of never being able to drive a bus again. (He'd grown up on a farm in Mazomanie and said he'd had only one dream from the time he was 9 or 10: to drive a big, shiny Greyhound bus.)

Brennan: What are you missing right now? As a columnist, for twenty-six years I could get up two or three times a week, see something on the news or hear about something and I could write about it or I could go out and find someone who was linked to a major story. Or someone would contact me. Most of my stories actually came from readers who heard about someone who was down and out or something that was happening. And so all of a sudden for the first time in my adult life I wake up in the morning and while this is great, I don’t have an outlet for my feelings, for my views. It’s very strange. And that’s why, sometimes in the next couple months I’m just hoping that I can start writing again.

We do too, Rob. We do too!

Mrs. Farley's Son

2008-05-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

I hope Chris Farley’s mom Mary Anne had a nice Mother’s Day last Sunday. I hope her four living children called from wherever on earth they were to say they love her, sent her cards that made her giggle and flowers that make her happy. If anybody was nearby, I hope they stopped over with the grandkids and fussed over her more than usual. And I hope these bright spots in the day brought her joy, because you have to believe Chris Farley’s mom was in pain. I imagine it was a quiet pain, the kind you feel down deep, the kind that washes over you, then weighs down like an anchor on the tips of your toes. The kind of pain that can only come over a mother who has been made to endure the death of a son—a young son, a loving son, a smart and funny son.

Mrs. Farley’s son was the kind of famous only a handful of humans get to be. Rock-star famous. Some Saturday nights Chris Farley was the funniest damn guy on the planet—at least to the parts of the planet that aired Saturday Night Live and the people on the planet who could stay up late enough to watch him. How somebody could get into a character the way he did—with such “gusto,” as one person who worked with him back in his Madison improv days put it—is the stuff of genius.

The Chris Farley Show, released in hardcover by Viking last week, describes in detail the funnyman’s rise to renown. But to the Farley family’s credit the story does not shy away from the ugly tailspin into obliteration that followed. To be honest, it sort of feels like E! True Hollywood Story with a purpose. Chris’s biography is at times so sad it’s almost too hard to go there with him—even in the pages of a book. But his brother Tom, who co-wrote the book, did. He went there. He says it took him ten years, but he did it. And so I think you should, too.

I promise you won’t regret it. To be honest, I had no personal or professional investment in the book (see the blog before this one). I only know Tom a little, though I think he’s a really nice, warm, well-meaning guy. I certainly don’t know the rest of the Farleys or anybody particularly close them. My closest claim is a friend who grew up a few blocks away from their home in Maple Bluff. That and the time I stumbled into a Northwoods bar to find Chris holding court on a visit to the summer camp he and his brothers cherished. It’s a memory I’ll never forget.

As for Chris’s career, I wasn’t all that impressed with the guy the few years he was an uber-celebrity. Hated Tommy Boy. Still do. Other than the fact that I’ve spent the last fourteen years living in his hometown, and for the last eight I’ve edited a magazine named for that city, I didn’t have any compelling reason to connect with the story—and yet I devoured the extremely well-edited string of recollections from the people who knew him like it was my first meal in a week. SNL captain Lorne Michaels said part of Chris’s attraction was you felt like you knew him. But after reading the book, it’s clear I didn’t. I had no idea the depths of his talent or the sad, frightening toll his addiction took on him and his loved ones.

After speaking with Tom yesterday during a taping of Neil Heinen’s For the Record, I came away feeling like the book was cathartic for him, and that it’s given him a renewed energy to pursue his noble efforts to reach kids battling addiction through the Chris Farley Foundation he runs. Tom turned me on to one more reason to read, appreciate and share this book with others: it can help heal people. Read the speech Chris gave at the Hazelden rehab facility during his three years of sobriety, then turn the pages that lead to his death just a few years later. It’s a real wakeup call to how deep and devastating it is to battle alcohol and drugs.

Tom told us that when Chris was sober, “nobody could touch him.” The skits etched into our collective memory, such as motivational speaker Matt Foley and rabid fan Chris fawning over Paul McCartney, were crafted and performed when the man was healthy. When Chris’s mom could sleep at night.

Everything Happens for a Reason

2008-05-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

It took me a while to get over being snubbed by Tom Farley’s publisher, Viking Press. Okay I’m still not over it, but, anyway, a few months ago I asked about excerpting The Chris Farley Show, the new oral history out by Tom and Tanner Colby (he's the guy who co-wrote the John Belushi biography). They said no, that I couldn’t have at anything in the book until after Playboy’s excerpt came out in May. Niiiiiiiiiice. Because I am THE GOLD MEDALIST in the Holding Grudges Olympics (just ask my spouse), I decided I was going to let the book release occasion pass with nary a written word. But then I ran into Jodi Cohen last Friday and I realized why Tom couldn’t secretly break the Viking Press rules for Chris’ hometown magazine—a magazine that put him on the cover in 1994. The reason is, duh, because Madison Magazine is supposed to write about Chris’ early career in Madison. And Jodi, who co-founded and directed Ark's second improv company Animal Crackers, where Chris got his start, is my conduit to those years. Off we go.

What’s your history with the Ark Improvisational Theater (whose most famous members were Farley and Joan Cusack)? I think I joined the Ark in ’84. They were still at Club de Wash and it was before we moved into 220 North Bassett. I was there until it closed in 1991. 220 N. Bassett was a Brinks truck garage that (Ark founders) Dennis Kern and Elaine Eldridge rented and turned into a black-box theater. I started out doing improv and then, when we got the theater, we did started doing sketch comedy and musical revues. Then Dennis and Elaine asked me to direct a (a new company) Animal Crackers, and so we auditioned people. That’s the first time I met Chris. I didn’t know until the book came out that he had come to the theater the night before and talked to Dennis.

In the new Chris Farley book, which is basically a string of quotes—an oral history—that tells his fascinating life story, you get 109 words on page 57. Really up until I had read the book I had very much packaged and just robotically talked about Chris, what I knew about Chris, my experience with Chris. My standard response was, “Chris Farley was in my improv company.” People were like, “Ohhhhhhhhhh! Oh my God what was that like?” It’s like, “Well, it’s hard to be with somebody who’s an addict.” Improv is all about trust and it was always an adventure because I never knew what shape he was going to be in the night of the show. The other thing I would always say, and this still remains true is that he was a really great improviser. And once he became famous and once you saw him on SNL or in the movies you never really got to see what was so great about his comic genius.

What was so great about his comic genius? He was really physical and he could think on his feet. Reading the book, that was kind of the beginning of my feeling the heartbreak of Chris not being on the planet anymore. It really hit me. It was like, "He's gone?" And he was so young and he was really talented. I feel like when he got to be at SNL and in his movies he seems kind of two-dimensional. You know it’s the difference between live theater and something that’s videotaped, it’s not the same. He was a great scene partner. People did get to see him being a physical improviser in the moment. What was so fun improvising with him is how his physicality would manifest in whatever was happening in the scene.

Do you have a specific memory? I remember we would do these characters where we were performing surgery using these teeny, tiny instruments that we would use. He’s so big so the contrast was so funny. And he would take it really seriously, which makes the comedy all the more heightened—that he would really commit to whatever was happening. The other thing was I remember something about him barbecuing and doing this character of Mr. Carruthers and “Yeah, come on over.” It was very much a joyful, jovial character. On SNL all that stuff is scripted so you don’t get to see a lot of the joy or a lot of the creativity that would come out that you do in improv. He was very physical as an improviser and we would always do this one beat in a certain scene where I would run across the stage and jump into his arms. For all the garbage that went on off stage … he had a lot of gusto as a scene partner.

Dennis Kern talks about Chris’ motivational speaker character, Matt Foley, getting its start at the Ark. I don’t remember that. That character scared me when I would see it on TV. It just felt too out of control. And you know he was really trying to pimp his scene partners by either varying off the script or just breaking the boundaries. I do remember watching them crack up, which is always fun. I remember at the Ark, Todd Brown, one of the improvisers, would do “Elvis Before.” And then Chris would come out in some white jumpsuit and do “Elvis After”—after all the drugs and the drinking.

Brian Stack, who was at the Ark with you and Chris, says in the book, “He could do the same thing fifty times and somehow always make it funny." I think part of Chris being a good improviser is his total commitment to whatever was happening in the scene. … I always think comedy basically comes down to taking something really mundane and you add something bizarre. Or you do something really bizarre in a really mundane way. It’s the contrast and that you’re not expecting it, and then when you really commit to it, it just heightens it all the more.

There are a lot of similarities to Chris in the way that you use humor. You wrote, “Humor is what helps me get through, get by, get around, get over things and people … keeps me from digging around on the inside.” That’s Chris. All I have is my own experience. What was so sad about reading the book was the depth of the struggles that Chris had. I think about what it means to live a self-examined life and what it means to just stay at the surface. I know that I’m really sensitive. The good things are really great. The bad things are horrible and I feel like I need to leave the country and I’m going to go live on the side of a mountain and eat a grain of rice that’s lifted up to me by a bucket every day. That’s the ultimate escape fantasy. The thing about being sensitive is that we feel everything. I had no idea about Chris’ OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). It just seems like there was so much suffering and no matter how many people tried to help he was alone with it. I didn’t understand about alcoholism and I didn’t understand about addiction back when I worked with him. In my ignorance I just thought, “You can’t do that," or, "That won’t work," and I didn’t understand what I was up against. As the director, I was the authority figure and Chris was not happy with my response to his habits.

In hindsight what might you have done differently? I didn’t understand how addiction works so I didn’t understand the loyalty to using and what happens when you interrupt that or get in the way of that.

Were you writing for the troupe? I'd written some sketches that the improv group performed. The first thing I ever wrote was with Lois Nowicki, who’s since passed away, and Nancy Deutsch, who lives in San Francisco. The three of us did a show together called “Just Listen, It’s NukeSpeak,” where we did a series of characters, monologues and scenes. It was this very sweet three-person show. I remember Chris was living in Chicago and came back to town and saw the show when he came to the theater to say hello to folks. He had broken his foot. He was on crutches, which I read about how that happened in the book. I remember him being in the lobby one night. We didn’t get along off stage so he’d be very aloof, very cool, and said, “That was really good.” And I was very icy, very aloof, and said, “Thank you.” Just dagger, dagger, dagger, dagger, back and forth.

Is your current improv company Spin Cycle a mature, grownup version of Animal Crackers? I’m still doing short-form improv. Everything I learned back then is what I still do. I very much have Dennis and Elaine’s sensibility. We weren’t really encouraged to do gutter humor. The thinking behind that was anybody can do gutter humor. It's an easy choice in a scene. And what I've learned since is that it never serves the scene. Somebody will grab focus for a laugh or a joke but it never really moves anything along. Also we were encouraged not to swear. I feel a little bit prudish about improv that way. Elaine and Dennis had theater backgrounds. We would do a game called theater styles, and I would read Chekhov and Shaw and Ibsen and Williams, so that when somebody called those things out I knew what those plays were. There was so much theater that occurred in the improv and then in the sketches. I remember we were rehearsing a sketch and Elaine said, “Who brought the samovar?" and I was like, “What the hell is a samovar? I don’t even know what this is but I’m supposed to bring one.”

You wrote in your blog: “Real humor has little to do with telling jokes and everything to do with connecting with others.” I think with anything done well it looks easier than it is. I think that telling stories is really age-old and it's how we connect with each other. I keep thinking that Chris, in his own way, with all of his shtick and everything that went on, he was such a great storyteller. He used all of his body and everything that he had got used in the communication when he was able to do that.

Your writing makes me laugh out loud. I get such joy out of it. Thank you. When I’ve written something that I like, I love to re-read it. I love to let it alone and then come back to it. It’s nice to find it again. I always encourage people who are writers to take improv because you’re working on your writing skills. It’s very much writing in the moment. You are called on to invent things and write on the spot without the censor. And when you’re improvising you really have to keep things moving. I think it’s great training for anybody that writes.

You wear lots of hats in the work that you do. I think about us being human “doings” and us being human “beings.” I’m a writer. I’m a storyteller. I’m an improviser. I’m an artist. I’m a creator. I’m a comedienne. Those are the labels. And then I think about what I do. I do improv. I do keynote speaking. I do motivational speaking. I do training. I teach. When I think about what’s most important to me, I really think it’s art in whatever way it shows up. When I’m performing I feel like this is what I’m meant to do–when it’s going well, I should say. When it’s happening and it’s clicking there’s nothing else like it. I feel like this is why I’m on the planet this time around. And then when I’m writing and the writing goes well and the writing is well received, I think, “This is my real work!” I think it all has to do with offering something and being received in whatever format that is. I think I know how to do that best when it comes to creating art.

Finally, Jodi, please finish these sentences…

After Russ Feingold came to my one-woman show... I finally realized that we would never job share.
The difference between being funny and writing funny is... being funny doesn’t necessarily involve sitting down, writing funny is all about the editing. This is my final answer after three edits. Make that four edits. Five edits.
What I really love is... making art that is well received by people.
What I really hate is... feeling disconnected from people.

Jodi’s spiffy bio: Jodi Cohen translates how the principles of ‘Improvisational Thinking’ impact our everyday lives, liberate our innate talents and awaken the muscles that allow us to connect, collaborate and generate big ideas. Jodi teaches ‘Improvisational Thinking’ strategies to an increasing number of business and community leaders to afford them new ways to think, respond and behave. These simple, profound and user-friendly ideas inspire improved performance, increased productivity and rampant innovation among participants. Jodi’s studied and taught improv for twenty-five years and is artistic director of SPIN CYCLE Improv Troupe.

What Moe Knows

2008-05-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

Newly minted Wisconsin State Journal columnist (and former Mad Mag editor) Doug Moe talks about life before, during and after The Capital Times

How’s the new gig? What’s different? For 11 years when I was doing the column, I always wrote a day ahead and then would go home. If my eyes had snapped open in the middle of the night and I thought, “Oh, how could you write that?” or, “Gosh, I hope I spelled that guy’s name right,” I could tweak it. Even in the days of two editions of The Cap Times, the first edition didn’t go until 9:30 in the morning. When it went down to one edition you had ’til noon to tweak it. Now the paper hits the driveway at 5:30 and there it is! That was scary the first couple of weeks. The other thing, honestly, is the expanded readership. I think most writers would like that. We signed on a lot of the former daily Cap Times subscribers and so [subscriptions] are up around 100,000 now daily.

Are you thinking differently about how your write your column? Not really. I try to keep it very local. I try to mix it up. I wouldn’t want to have three sports in a row, two histories in a row. I would love to have five funny ones in a row because it’s the hardest thing in the world to do. My first reaction to an idea is, can I make this humorous? It’s really hard. There’s a line in that great Peter O’Toole movie My Favorite Year, where he’s an actor and he says, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Dave Barry makes a lot of money for a reason. Right, and The Onion is the only print newspaper that’s rapidly expanding its print edition in cities all over the country.

Some people might not know the distance you traveled from one newsroom to the other. [Ed's Note: The State Journal nabbed Moe from The Cap Times—both papers are in the same building on Fish Hatchery Road) What was that experience like? Without getting into the whole thing, that was tough in early February when [Cap Times management] had the meeting and they basically told virtually everybody to reapply for their jobs. And so that started the process for me. Granted, I guess it seems kind of unusual because I’m the only one that did move over. But it happened, and I’m still friends with The Cap Times folks. … Every day it seems more natural to be over here. It was and continues to be ... tough isn’t really the word … it’s unsettled, you know, I think it still is, around the building a little bit.

How did you get started in journalism? I got out of college in 1979, and I didn’t have any loans to pay off. My girlfriend at the time was living in Portage and working for the Portage Daily Register, so I moved up there and it was very cheap to live and I launched a freelance career. I wrote like a maniac for everybody that would pay me. I got a book contract in 1984 to collaborate with a crazy football player named Lyle Alzado on his autobiography. Then in 1986, [Madison Magazine publishers] the Selks created an associate editor position for me, which was really just a writing position, and I did that for five years and became editor in 1991 and stayed through ’97.

What were those years like when you were trying to capture Madison in Madison Magazine? It was great. I think on the financial end they had good years and bad years. … But I was shielded from that. I was just a writer. But even when Gail was publisher and I was editor, she never burdened me with that, which was nice. I wrote a lot. I wrote most of the covers for an extended period, or at least the lead stories. And I wrote a fun column that’s not a whole lot different that what I do in the paper—we called it “Hanging Out.” And then I did some press criticism, which drove ’em nuts out here at the newspaper.

Tell us about your book career, starting with the one back in the '80s. That one, by the way, was never published. I’ve started revisiting it as a biography. His name was Lyle Alzado and his agent lived in Madison. Lyle became the poster child for steroids because he had denied using them for many, many years, and then ended up getting brain cancer and blaming steroids. The medical community was split but he died at 42. It was just a crazy experience collaborating with the guy. The first line of the new manuscript is: “On the night of the day I flew two thousand miles to move into a house with Lyle Alzado, he moved out.” He had a horrible fight with his wife, whom he was breaking up with. I’m cowering under the guest bed, and they’re screaming at each other.

My first [book] was the Royko biography in 1999. I collaborated on a biography of [Madison architect] Marshall Erdman that his family financed [Uncommon Sense: The Life of Marshall Erdman]. The UW boxing book came out in ’04, the column collection a couple of years ago, and now this fall I’ve got a new one, Favre: His 20 Greatest Games [Big Earth Publishing]. I just got a note yesterday from the publisher, they’re really happy with it.

When you sit down to write, what motivates you? Really, in winter, it’s nice to have something to do. Wit this one, there was a lot of research to do first. I managed to get tapes or DVDs of all the games that I’d picked. So then you watch the games and take notes. That’s arduous. What I always tell people is—maybe it sounds simplistic and is easier said than done—but the truth of the matter is if you do two or three pages a day, in six months you’ve got a 400-page manuscript.

Do you have a book you’ve always wanted to do? The Alzado biography, with all the steroid implications, could be important. But the great unfinished story is Leo Burt and the Sterling Hall bombi ng.

Do you have theories about what happened to Burt? No more than anybody else. I identified him as the Unabomber in Madison Magazine six months before they caught the real one.

Are you expecting the [conversation] about whether or not those 20 Favre games you’ve chosen are really the greatest? I think that’s probably one of the reasons they came up with the idea is that it will generate a lot of controversy or at least discussion. I tried to pick games that had some larger implications other than that he’d played extremely well because he played well a lot of times. I was able to pick the obvious one that people always mention first is the Monday night game after his father died. He played heroically under extreme circumstances. I did the game where he came back after he admitted his painkiller addition. The publisher said [I] managed to capture the arc of his life cast inside these 20 games. That’s what I was shooting for. Like the Monday night Denver game this year when his wife was in the press box and had just decided to come forward [with her book] and so that gave me the chance to write about their relationship. I picked the last game in County Stadium, where Brett scored on the last-second scramble run in the second or third year. It gave me the chance to talk about the Packers history in Milwaukee and the decision to move out. I interviewed Bob Harlan because he was the guy who made that tough call.

When you edited the magazine how hard was it to decide what to write about? When I became editor my goal was to have the best mix of stories I possibly could.

What was it like finding good writers? Some months are better than others, but like you, sometimes you get lucky. A guy named Dwight Allen moved to town from the New Yorker. So immediately I assigned him a column on Roundy Coughlin, who was the hayseed, colorful, widely read sports columnist for the State Journal. He wrote a column called “Roundy Says” from the forties into the seventies, and I always had an idea that if the right writer came along that he would be a great history profile. And Dwight just did a spectacular job. And then over the transom came W.C. Heinz. He had collaborated with Vince Lombardi on Run to Daylight. He was one of a half a dozen best sports writers of his era and I knew him through a mutual friend. But on the 25th anniversary of Lombardi’s death he sends me in a reminiscence of his time with Lombardi. And then we got David Maraniss to write coming back to Madison after 25 years, what had changed. Those are the pieces that I remember, when I was able to get lucky and lure some real special writers.
Finally, Doug, finish these sentences:
Brett Favre should... stay retired (my selfish author side coming out).
Golf shoes... are overrated. I used to play barefoot until some bureaucrat decided what they put on the grass is bad for you.
The kid in me… never met a cheeseburger he didn't like.

Brennan's "Three on Thursday"

1. Hitting the Shelves: The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts ($26.95, Viking) is due out May 6. Big brother Tom Farley and John Belushi co-biographer Tanner Colby conducted more than a hundred interviews to capture the Madisonian and famous comedian’s life story in the words of those who knew him. Sure, the book will sell—Playboy is about to excerpt it—because it features Chevy Chase, Lorne Michaels and David Spade (who comes off looking petty, even spiteful at times), Madison readers will love the walk down memory lane and admire the Farley family’s Midwestern humility willingness to share their story, warts and all.

2. Here’s what Doug Moe told me about Chris Farley: “I went out with [former TV anchor and Congressman] Scott Klug, and he hosted us for three days in New York, which was really fun. We went to the rehearsal and the show that night, went to the after party. Then that next morning we went over to Chris’s apartment and he made us breakfast. He was a cover story in Madison Magazine in February of 1994.

3. Best Writing in April: “It takes longer for two guys to get picked up than one, so we were surprised 10 minutes in when a faded green, two-door Chevy Nova, the victim of a half-ass chop job, cut hard into the shoulder and crunched to a stop on the white gravel 50 yards up the interstate.” – From “On the road? Hitchhiking isn’t what it used to be” by Andy Moore, Isthmus, April 11, 2008

Poetry in Motion

2008-04-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

So I flip to the back of the book, maybe because that’s what Madison Magazine readers do every month (see why here). More likely, though, it’s because the paperback I hold in my hands—a poem of epic proportions—is so new its spine hugs a hundred pages tight like earth clutching skinny blades of grass. I hold the soft cover steady with both hands, and then scan the words on the page with indifference; they’ll be of no use to me.

“This book is set in Adobe Jensen. Jensen is a digital reflection of typefaces designed in fifteenth-century Venice.”

The person who gave me the book loves Italy like a drunk loves gin. But I quickly conclude that the font’s Euro-pedigree isn’t why he picked up Braided Creek, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, for my thirty-seventh birthday last week. (Nor is it the gin.)

While I’d like to think there’s some karmic moment hard at work here, my rational self tells me I ended up at the end of the book by accident. And that the reason my boss chose the raw and sentimental Braided Creek is not because of Italian typeface but instead to high-five the launch of our new poetry column, “A Poet’s Place.” Neil is a huge fan of both poets, who in the book correspond back and forth with one another through short poems after Kooser is diagnosed with cancer. The intimate exchange is published as one long and winding sonnet played out on the page like a dynamic tennis match between two of the best players in the world.

To execute the mag’s new poetry corner, Neil wisely suggested we use Kooser’s free weekly column for newspapers and online publications, “American Life in Poetry.” So like any enterprising editor, I lifted the format in full. Kooser, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004–2006, picks a poet, writes why it’s inspirational to him, and then shares the poem. But Kooser isn’t podcasting the things of beauty. That was our idea.

Our debut poem was penned by Madison poet laureate Fabu, who, from henceforth, will choose poems submitted to her for consideration at fabu@poetfabu.com. The project is in its infancy and already we have a passel of poets aching to be published. It’s good to be desirable, but I fear (no, I know) that part of this endeavor’s popularity is the dearth of poetry in everyday life. While there is poets’ prose percolating in every corner of this city, you often never know it unless you travel in their circles.

That’s in part why Fabu came to us with her mission “to place poetry in unusual places.” Sure, I’d prefer our magazine not be cast as an “unusual” venue for poetry. In a way that’s sad. And yet I don’t bemoan our heretofore lack of it. Instead I celebrate its place—a poet’s place—now, and in future issues of Mad Mag, as well as on our website.

Calling all poets.

Neil?

###

Here’s how to find poetry all around you: www.madpoetry.org
In August Madison will host the Olympics of poetry slam, with 75 teams of poets from North America and Europe competing in venues around the city. http://nps2008.com/

There She Goes

2008-04-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Hilarious, self-deprecating, and moving on after twenty-five years in the newspaper business, former Wisconsin State Journal columnist Susan Lampert Smith talks about her new job in public affairs at UW Hospital & Clinics, plus juicy stuff, like the real reason she never became an editor, what’s so great about having her own Facebook page, how she got “suckered in” by a story or two, what her first-grade teacher did to her, what she thinks about The Capital Times calling its print edition quits, and lots more.

BN: So let’s not talk about your departure from the State Journal. I feel like I had a great run there, and it’s just over (laughs). That’s just how things are in life sometimes, you know, you realize when it’s time to leave the party.

BN: How would you characterize your writer’s point of view? I’ve just always tried to approach it as a Wisconsin native and somebody who’s loved this area and this state. My family goes back to the 1820s in Wisconsin. I grew up going Up North for vacation and going to Milwaukee to see the Packers play. That’s how old I am—I remember when they played at county stadium. When I wrote my “On Wisconsin” column [1994-2004], it was really great because I got to explore and then tell people about all the cool people and places that I found out there. That was my favorite part of every job.

BN: How did you get your start? I started out as the lowliest person imaginable. I was hired to answer phones for the state editor for $4.80 an hour. I’m not kidding. I clawed my way up. I graduated from college in 1982, which was the last really bad recession and there just weren’t any jobs. I got married while I was in college to a farmer, so I knew I was staying here. So really the $4.80 an hour phone-answering job was a pretty good job.

BN: Do you have a journalism degree? My degree’s actually in Ag Journalism [from UW–Madison] and I still teach there—the department’s now called Life Sciences Communication. It’s really a good department because it’s very hands-on and practical. I started in the journalism school but back then it was huge and you never got to meet your professors.

I actually got very sick when I was a sophomore in college and I ended up in the old University Hospital. It was the lowest moment of my young life. I remember looking out the window and watching all the students walk by in bed sheets on their way to their first toga party, and I couldn’t go. But my [hospital] roommate had fallen off her bike and had a head injury, and three of her professors came to see her in the hospital and I’m like, “What’s your major?” And she’s like, “Ag Journalism.” I’m like “That’s what I want to major in!”

BN: What’s been the best thing about the teaching experience? Being in touch with young people is always great because you find out what’s cool. I’ve had a Facebook page for like five years, which is pretty amazing for an old person. Now admittedly it’s an extremely lame Facebook page but I do get invited to all kinds of beer parties. I think some of that has pushed my desire to get out of newspapers, too, because for years I would always require kids to get the newspaper and I’d quiz them on current events. About five years ago they started really complaining about it. “No one reads the newspaper. We can get this all online.” It’s like a stake through your heart but it really was true.

BN: Who are the best and the brightest young journalists and what are the skills they’re going to need? I still think you’re going to need to be able to write quickly, concisely and engagingly. Because it’s the same problem if you can’t get somebody to read the first three inches of a newspaper story—they’re not going to click to it on a web page. I think it actually ups the ante for being better writers and writing better leads.

BN: My gut reaction to The Capital Times news was, “Wow, you’re going to be relevant again. Isn’t this exciting for journalism.” Yeah I think we’re all really interested to see if that can fly. I hope it does, but there is the worrisome side. If it doesn’t work it’s a lot easier to pull the plug on that than the full newspaper. I hope it works. I hope they figure it out. The basic problem is not to get people to read it. Our readers are still there. It’s just the advertising money. … The challenges in some ways are on the business side, right now anyway.

BN: Is PR a natural fit for journalists because you develop those relationships over the years? I don’t know. More money, which is great! The benefits, working for the state, are fabulous. I think it’s hard to give up journalism because it’s so interesting. You meet new people. You’re learning about new things. And in my job I’m going to be covering all the basic science research in the medical school.

BN: You’re going to be a journalist. It’s going to be the same kind of thing. I’m going to find out the latest thing on fixing my wandering brain or making me live forever… or all the bad things I’ve been doing to myself. It’s really going to feed my hypochondria, though. I’m looking forward to all the new diseases on that.

BN: How is your health? My courageous 45-minute battle with cancer, as my mean newspaper friends call it. I did have malignant melanoma, which can kill you, but if they get it soon enough it’s no big deal.

BN: What will you miss most about the job? What I will miss most is the readers. You’re always getting feedback. “Please do this. Why’d you do that? You’re an idiot! You’re so smart!”

BN: What was the biggest splash a column ever made? I’m not sure because we have a tendency to forget something and go on to the next thing. There are definitely issues that cranked people up. In recent years, I would say the Madison smoking ban. Anytime you write about smoking people go insane. I saw it from both sides because I don’t smoke and I have asthma and I hate cigarettes. And then I also know Mary and Al [Tedeschi, owners of The Villa Tap on the north side of Madison) and I know how hurt they were by that. When you do it piecemeal like that it’s very hurtful on the people and the places that can’t do it when they can across the street.

BN: My favorite dust-up was the controversy over breastfeeding at Camp Randall. That’s what’s cool about being a columnist—you can bring light to these things. I think the people at UW really didn’t get it. They’re all guys. They never thought of this before. When they did they thought, “Well, why would you do that?” Then it got picked up by the radio yellers, and they twisted it to say that I was in favor of bringing babies to Camp Randall, and they don’t want babies at Camp Randall. That really wasn’t what it was about. Women just wanted a place to pump that wasn’t the bathroom. No guy’s ever been through that.

BN: What is the future of the media then if people, as you say, are bypassing the media for their information? Where is the place for these conversations? I don’t know because I really feel it plays an important role in the community. Look at it playing out right now. It’s a small example but the poor guy whose girlfriend was killed in the apartment and the landlord won’t let him out of the lease. They finally backed off when Dee Hall did a story about that. http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/breaking_news/281508 If you don’t have a daily newspaper and you can’t shame people who need it, what’s going to happen? We’re obviously going to do less of it at the State Journal because they didn’t replace me.

BN: After the State Journal decided to suspend your column, was there a day you just said, “I’m done?” I don’t know. It’s actually harder on my family. My dad is of that generation where they all read the newspaper and he goes to the diner and people say, “Oh I read what your daughter wrote today.” My kids go to school and the teachers read it and they think it’s cool and they talk about it in class. I think I’m over it because I got the bad side of it, too. The creepy, icky voicemails from stalker people. I actually had a stalker come out to my house and take photos of my house and put it on the Internet so people could find me if they wanted to. I got the downside of the local “see the celebrity” thing, so I think it’s easier for me to walk away from it.

BN: Are you spending more time on the farm? I have a date with about a thousand lettuce seedlings this afternoon. [Her new job hasn’t started yet…] When we were young I did a lot of it and then we had kids and I was busy corralling them around. It’s mostly [husband] Matt’s thing and that’s good because we’re both bossy oldest children and it’s better if he does his thing and I do mine.

BN: How was that life-work balance been for you over the years? It was good when I was doing the “On Wisconsin” column because I worked out of my house a lot. I didn’t go into the office as much. Back in those days they didn’t care if they didn’t see you as long as they got your stories. Matt was here, too. I definitely did some interviews from inside my shower while the kids were banging on the bathroom door. I did have the advantage of a pretty flexible job when they were little. And I would take them along a lot. I did a lot of cool stories with them. I took them to pow-wows and buffalo roundups and the EAA.

BN: What do you think about editors—somebody told me once that we’re just a bunch of frustrated writers. A good editor is a precious thing and I’ve had some over the years. The problem is, once you’ve had a good editor, it’s really hard to go back to someone who isn’t. A good editor saves you from your worst faults and helps your best qualities shine. They’re few and far between, and it’s hard in the newspaper business because they’re such grueling jobs. They’re in the bowels of the slave ship chained to the oars with a police scanner. That’s why I never moved up to the editor’s side because I never wanted to do that. I do actually enjoy editing. I enjoy working with my students. But the day-to-day stuff that goes on at a newspaper is really hard. There are very few people that are good at it, and the ones who are tend to burn out and leave.

BN: How do you sit down to write a column? I’m a big procrastinator like a lot of journalists. When I do sit down I write incredibly fast, so I think what I’m doing when I’m procrastinating is getting it all written in my head so I can just sit down and blast it out.

BN: Why did you gain the kind of audience following you did? I think I speak to people from the heart, and directly. I either make them mad or they agree with me. I think it’s because I write simply. I write how I talk. It’s right there, so you like me or you hate me. You pretty much know where I’m coming from.

BN: You have two kids, right? Lily is a junior in high school, and we’re doing all the college tours. Ben is a sophomore at UW–Madison.

BN: How’s he doing there? Good, except he just signed a lease on a place that’s across the street from the [Brittany Zimmerman] murder house. I’m really not one of those worried parents. I think part of that is from being in the newspaper business. Most people who get killed do so by somebody who knew them. These random stranger stabbings are so creepy and weird. And I think students are just the perfect targets for this, too. My kid has the world’s biggest heart. He’s never gone without a meal so if somebody panhandles him he’s pulling his wallet out. You multiply that by 20,000 and you have a lot of potential victims.

BN: What are you most looking forward to about your new adventure? I think it’ll just be fun to learn again. It’s going to be like being in college. I’m excited to learn about all the new research and see if the parts of my brain that remembers things like stem cells and genetic engineering are still alive.

BN: Where will your work appear? There’s a medical school magazine that I’ll write for. Online. Press releases. Not all my job is going to be writing, either. A lot of it is getting publicity for the research. In some ways it’s going to be less stressful than the newspaper. You don’t have the daily deadlines, but it’s going to be stressful for me to have to be in my desk in a chair early in the morning. And be there all day! I’m serious. When I was a kid my first-grade teacher tied me to my chair. Journalism is the perfect job for people with ADD. I’m excited about working with a lot of people I already know and respect and like.

But I’m probably not going to stay at my next job for twenty-five years. Note to self: show some career versatility! That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this. The State Journal said I could go back to writing about rural Wisconsin. I thought about it, but that’s going back. I want to learn something new. I thought about it, and I actually wrote a note to readers that that’s what I was going to do. And then I did two stories and quit. They’re probably wondering what happened to me.

Not anymore. Thanks, Susan, and best of luck on your new adventure! B.N.