NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER

From The! Greatest! of! Marlys! (Sasquatch Books, 2000)

What is the best thing about living on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin? What is the worst thing?

We have an old oak grove behind the barn—with trees dating from before the Civil War. We have a lot of birds. I love birds. I can’t believe how many kinds there are. The barn swallows build their nests in the barn. Kevin has done a lot of restoration to the land here so the plants that support the native populations of insects and animals are here, and the birds seem especially happy.

I love my community too. It’s good having friends who farm. It’s good to know the names of their cows and the calves that come in the spring. It’s fun to see the new ones when I head up to get eggs from my neighbor. It’s good knowing they would be here in a minute for us anytime day or night, and it’s good knowing they can count on us the same way. We have a 1958 Ford tractor that I love. We have silos and a barn that has been here 100 years. The original house burned down years before we got here. Our house is a little tract house—nothing much at all. But we put on a tin roof and a covered porch and built a masonry bread oven. We have a big garden—man, I’m starting to cry here. It’s not the prettiest farm at all, but it’s the best place I’ve ever lived in my life.

Wow. Do you bother watching TV at all? What do you like to do for fun?

I love TV. When we moved to our farm Kevin asked that we not get a satellite dish and that we make do with local reception. At first I couldn’t even consider it. But it’s been very good for me to have an actual limit on what I can watch. Our reception is horrible. We hardly get a channel clearly. And pretty soon when the analog signal is gone we’ll get nothing at all, and I’m ready for that step. But I love TV! My favorite shows are Wife Swap and Super Nanny. I’ll miss those the most. When I travel I have a hard time leaving a hotel room that has cable.

What I like to do for fun is draw, write, garden, and visit the historical society in Footville—the closest town. It’s packed with scrapbooks and diaries from people in our area. It’s in a tiny old bank and smells like the best library. I call it the time machine. The woman in charge of it, Kay Demrow, is 72.

I love her. She has devoted her life to organizing and transcribing thousands and thousands of handwritten documents.

Can you tell us about how your most recent book, What It Is, came about?

What It Is is based on a writing class I teach called Writing the Unthinkable. I’d been wanting to make a book version of the class for a while but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t want it to be just text instructions or texts of ideas about how to write. I wanted handwriting to be a big part of it and I wanted it to make people just itch to make something. To me, writing or painting or collage are not different at all. They are like different hand puppets—but the living part of them is something I call “the image” because my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, called it that when I studied with her in college in the 70s. I was able to work with her for two years straight and everything I’ve done since is connected to what she taught me. My class is based on it, and the book is dedicated to her, and in a way all of my work is dedicated to her. She gave me something that has shaped my entire life and made me want to find a way to show it to other people.

I love teaching my class. Actually it’s been the one thing untouched by the turbines. When I leave here to go teach a workshop in Chicago or San Francisco I am free of worry and I am always elated by being in a room with students who are working hard. When I was little I wanted to be a teacher but never thought I could do it because I’m a terrible speller. I’m so happy to have found a way to manage it anyway.


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