Wisconsin Writes
When we sent out a call for submissions asking for contributions to “The Humanities in Our Lives,” we never expected to hear from so many humanities enthusiasts! And while they all couldn’t fit in the magazine, we think these folks deserve to be heard—or rather, read.
Click on the links to read about some Wisconsinites’ own “humanities moments.”
Karl Elder
In “The Sense of Nonsense,” Karl Elder remembers a nonsensical poem his father recited for years. In doing so, he writes his own ode to nonsense, asking: “would humans have made it to the moon without a language that allows a cow to leap over that moon in the imagination?”
Dean Andrade
In “Learning to Love” a young Dean Andrade signs up for a university course on Shakespeare, and soon learns for himself the truth in such “rich complexity of the language.” “Until that day, all I had known of love I had learned from books,” he writes, “not the lessons of life.”
Kathi J. Gardner
In “Coming of Age, Library Style,” Kathi J. Gardner honors the tutelage of Miss Selma Bartman, former Children’s Room librarian at the Marshfield Free Library. “My appetite for new words, new stories, was voracious,” she writes. “So the Saturday after my sixth birthday, the ‘coming of age’ for library membership, Mom took me by the hand and led me for the first time, wide-eyed and wired with anticipation, through the doors of the Children’s Room and up to the librarian’s desk.”
Ellen Lamping
In A Man, A Woman, and the Count, Ellen Lamping reveals that, while a woman might not be able to change a man, a book sometimes can.
Roland Liebenow, MD
In “How to Become a Historian,” retired physician Roland Liebenow explains how, in his local histories, he endeavors “to inspire residents of my community to develop a better understanding of and relationship to the town they currently inhabit.”
Estela Ohlrogge
In this memoir of her time teaching English as a Second Language to Vietnamese and Lao refugees in her native Philippines, Estela A. Ohlrogge recounts how reading and writing poetry helped to heal herself, and others.
Steven Fortney
In “My Aunt Selma and Our Learning,” Steven Fortney realizes just how much education changed him for the better. Looking back, he thanks his Aunt Selma for encouraging two generations of her family to pursue higher educations.
In her essay, associate professor Cathleen Palmini reflects on her experience at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where she researched the writings of women who lived in nineteenth-century Wisconsin. She writes: “If I had a stereotype of a mid-1800s woman, I soon lost it. They were witty; they were dull. They were educated; they were nearly illiterate. They put their best foot forward; they complained. They carried on under almost insurmountable odds; they sickened and died.