Join us on Sunday, September 18 from 2-4pm for a reading from the Tension Zones Collective Daybook. This program is part of The Shape of the Environment, an exhibition curated by Lelia Byron, on display August 23 through November 4.
A forest, an old field, a prairie remnant, or an urban tree canopy is each a set of constant tensions. In natural history terms, the Tension Zone is an S-curved boundary where Wisconsin’s southern plant communities and northern plant communities converge. Many of our most subtly dynamic landscapes exist in proximity to this zone.
The Tension Zones Collective Daybook began as an energetic, shared virtual writing space for five Wisconsin writers. These writers from various fields and backgrounds met weekly in a Wisconsin Academy of Letters, Arts & Sciences online course in the Spring of 2022. Please join Martha Bergland, Chuck Stebelton, Kate VandenBosch, Jane Curtis, and Rose Heflin to celebrate the results of this gathering.
In the spirit of The Shape of the Environment exhibition zine, special guest Mrill Ingram will join the Collective Daybook writers to share her Stories of Orphaned Space.
Martha Bergland is the author most recently of The Birdman of Koshkonong: The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021) She is coauthor, with Paul Hayes, of Studying Wisconsin, a Wisconsin Historical Society Press biography of famed Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham, which won the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Gambrinus Prize. She taught English for many years at Milwaukee Area Technical College. She lives in Glendale, Wisconsin.
Chuck Stebelton is author most recently of An Apostle Island (Oxeye Press, 2021). Previous poetry collections include The Platformist (Cultural Society, 2012) and Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005). He served as Literary Program Director at Woodland Pattern Book Center from 2005 to 2017. In 2018, he established Partly Press with an emphasis on well made poems-as-object and radically specific landscape poems. In 2021, he launched Ben Tinterstices Editions with a focus on collaborative print objects, mail art, and ephemera. He has led workshops and field trips for non-profit arts organizations and conservancy groups at Natural Resources Foundation, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Friends of Lorine Niedecker, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden. He has held residencies at Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2011, 2014, and from 2018 to 2022 ongoing.
Kate VandenBosch pursued graduate research at the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, then came to Madison in the mid-1980s as a post-doctoral researcher in UW’s department of botany. She returned to Wisconsin in 2012 to serve as dean of the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. From 2001-2012, she was head of the plant biology department at University of Minnesota in St. Paul. VandenBosch’s research focused on the genetics of legumes, a family that includes many agriculturally important species, and their development and symbioses with microbes. In 2009, VandenBosch was named a fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists. After stepping down as dean in August of this year, she looks forward to exploring plants through a different lens and telling their stories.
Jane Curtis is a retired English professor. She received her PhD in Contemporary Literature from The University of Wisconsin-Madison and wrote her dissertation on the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Jane was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study poetry at New York University. Two stories have been published in Midwest Review and Rosebud literary magazine (25th Anniversary Edition). Her novel Reach Her In This Light (an interwoven mosaic of flash fictions) is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Look for it in late 2023.
Originally from rural, southern Kentucky, Rose Menyon Heflin is a writer and artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals spanning four continents. Her work won a Merit Award from Arts for All Wisconsin in both 2021 and 2022. One of her poems was choreographed and performed by local dance troupe Breakthrough, and she had a creative nonfiction piece featured in the Chazen Museum of Art’s Companion Species exhibit. Her poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Backchannels Journal, The BeZine, Deep South Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Isotrope, Moss Piglet Zine, Of Rust and Glass, Pamplemousse, Poemeleon, Red Weather Literary Magazine, and San Antonio Review. An OCD-sufferer since childhood, she strongly prefers hugging trees instead of people.
Mrill Ingram is author of Loving Orphaned Space, the art and science of belonging to Earth. www.mrillingram.com.
Featured image: Regional Fire by Derick Wycherly.
